Quantitative fuel vapor/air mixing imaging in droplet/gas regions of an evaporating spray flow using filtered Rayleigh scattering.

This Letter demonstrates the application of filtered Rayleigh scattering (FRS) for quantitative two-dimensional fuel vapor/air mixing measurements in an evaporating hydrocarbon fuel spray flow. Using the FRS approach, gas-phase measurements are made in the presence of liquid-phase droplets without interference. Effective suppression of the liquid-phase droplet scattering using FRS is enabled by the high spectral purity of the current Nd:YAG laser system. Simultaneous Mie-scattering imaging is used to visualize the droplet field and illustrate the droplet loading under which the FRS imaging is applied in the current spray flows. The initial quantification of the FRS imaging is based on calibration measurements from a flow cell of known fuel vapor/air mixtures, while future work targets the utilization of a Rayleigh-Brillouin spectral model for quantification of the FRS signals.