Optical Techniques (Qualitative and Quantitaive Flow Visualization)
Home | Types of Optical Technique | Refractive Index based techniques

What is it ?

Uses light as a media and its various properties to enable qualitative and quantitative measurements. Various properties of light explored are scattering, bending due to changed refractive index etc.

Why Optical Technique ?

1. Non-intrusive technique:

Using a thermocouple or a thermometer usually changes the actual value of the temperature while coming to steady state. Optical techniques are non-intrusive and the measured value do not deviate from the actual value.

2. Highly real time:

Light travels at very high speed. So it's possible to make real time high speed measurements and only limited by instrumentation capability.

3. Good hardware capabilities available:

Rapid improvement of data storage and high speed computing enables effective use of this techniques. The development of this techniques were mostly limited by this in previuos days.

There are of course many more advantages to it.

What may stop you ?

1. Cost:

Magnitude of different in cost from conventional techniques.

2. Restricted to transparent media:

Light cannot travel via opaque media and thus is limited only to colorless fluids.

3. Difficult to set-up:

A large chunk of time should be spent on alighning the optical components for best results. This may be sometimes very tiresome.

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Page developed by Atanu Phukan. Copy of page materials undesired. Some of the images were collected from the internet and unable to mention the references is regretted.