By Innovative Scientific Solutions Inc.
Traditionally, PSP was used to measure low-frequency or steady-state pressure changes on model surfaces. With LED and high-speed camera technology rapidly advancing, fast-response PSP has also rapidly advanced over the past decade. Rather than acquiring steady-state results with traditional PSP data acquisition, fast-response PSP utilizes paints which respond to pressure changes much more rapidly, leading to accurate, high-resolution time resolved pressure data. With the vast amount of data collected (typically thousands of images per test condition), fast PSP has produced unsteady aerodynamics data like never before. Today, fast PSP can measure pressure fluctuations up to 20 kHz. Data mining these thousands of data points leads to vast improvement of CFD models and complete spatial distribution maps of pressure at selected frequencies. Problems like buffeting and acoustic noise can be studied at depth and resolved with data of the caliber. Fast PSP allows scientists to look at rapid pressure fluctuations on model surfaces like never before. Conventional methods of fast pressure fluctuation detection are limited to point measurements. If the sensor is in the wrong spot, it will be missed all together. Using the global data from fast PSP data collection, these fluctuations are brought into view rather easily. The above images show a US model painted with fast PSP, the model under UV illumination (through a long-pass filter to separate the UV light from the paint emission) and finally the processed PSP data with a false color map applied. This is only one in a series of thousands of images.
