Potential NASA Commercial Applications: Flight tests are often used as a final critical validation of aerodynamic designs developed by computational and wind tunnel methods because the information obtainable in wind tunnels is subject to interference. Outdoor schlieren systems using the sun and moon as background edges make it possible to visualize shock waves, intense noise features, jet plumes, and other phenomena from full-sized aircraft in flight. The proposed software makes it possible to obtain schlieren images using relatively simple camera hardware that may be deployed aboard research aircraft. Applications exist in all forms of research and development associated with turbulent flow fields including aero optics, flow control, drag, boundary layer transition, and flow separation. A possible future application is characterizing wingtip vortices from aircraft. The proposed development of schlieren imaging software will be extremely important in flight tests, where few aero-optical instruments can visualize airflows around full-sized aircraft in a flight environment.
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