Digital speckle photography and speckle tomography in heat transfer studies

Abstract The line-of-sight speckle photography of transparent media is used for quantitative measurements of the instantaneous temperature fields in 3D unsteady flows. Both electronic and photographic methods are employed for specklegram recording. The subsequent specklegram treatment uses the Young's fringes method as well as cross-correlation analysis of small interrogation areas of the recordings. Experimental data for three different heat transfer configurations are obtained and discussed. The first one is natural convection over extended vertical heated plates with forward facing steps, the second is unsteady 3D convective flow around a suddenly heated vertical thin wire, and the third one is a convective plume above a multi-jet flame. Both local and global Nusselt numbers are determined via measuring local surface temperature gradients for these convective flows. The results are compared with Ostrach's theory for a single vertical plate and with the data obtained by Mach–Zehnder interferometry. The 3D temperature fields are reconstructed for axisymmetric convective flows around a suddenly heated vertical wire using quasi-double projection measurement and the Radon inversion. 3D temperature distributions above the combustion zone are reconstructed using multi-projection speckle photography measurements and computerised tomography.