Visualization of a smoke flow field by using a lidar and DIC technique

A visualization technique for the velocity field of plant smoke is described. We intend to present a long-range measurement method for a velocity field calculation from a series of images containing an illuminated planar layer of fluid. The main system is configured with two technical parts. One is a lidar system, which is for measuring the distance from an observer to the plant smoke, and the other is a DIC (digital image correlation) system. We configured the lidar system by using a Nd-YAG pulsed laser (10 Hz, injection seeded), a telescope (Schmidt Cassegrain type, diameter: 30 cm) and a PMT (photomultiplier tube). The DIC system is configured to track smoke images by using the developed fast correlation algorithm of the DIC. We acquired the velocity fields of smoke by using the calculated distance and the DIC algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new method for measuring the smoke velocity and visualizing the flow field.