Ballistic Imaging of High-Pressure Fuel Sprays using Incoherent, Ultra- short Pulsed Illumination with an Ultrafast OKE-based Time Gating

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ultrafast optical Kerr effect time-gate using incoherent supercontinuum illumination for high-resolution ballistic imaging of high-pressure fuel sprays, enabling improved visualization of spray dynamics.

Contribution

It develops a novel incoherent ultrashort pulsed illumination technique using supercontinuum generation for enhanced ballistic imaging of fuel sprays.

Findings

Incoherent illumination improves spatial resolution.

The time-gate effectively captures high-pressure fuel spray images.

Comparison shows advantages over coherent illumination methods.

Abstract

We present an optical Kerr effect based time-gate with the collinear incidence of the pump and probe beams at the Kerr medium, liquid carbon disulfide, for ballistic imaging of the high-pressure fuel sprays. The probe pulse used to illuminate the object under study is extracted from the supercontinuum generated by tightly focusing intense femtosecond laser pulses inside water, thereby destroying their coherence. The optical imaging spatial resolution and gate timings are investigated and compared with a similar setup without supercontinuum generation, where the probe is still coherent. And finally, a few ballistic images of the fuel sprays using coherent and incoherent illumination with the proposed time-gate are presented and compared qualitatively.