Toward Quantitative Three-Dimensional and Three-Component Velocimetry in Reactive Flows

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The fundamental property called 3D3C velocity is important in a wide range of disciplines and its resolution is important for many societal challenges, including clean energy. For example, 3D3C velocity is required for better understanding and better design of energy systems, including gas turbines, wind turbines, and hydrogen engines. 3D3C velocity is flow velocity in all three dimensions (3D) with all three components (3C) resolved. Measuring this property is very important and considerable efforts have been invested to invent velocimetry techniques that can obtain 3D3C velocity measurements. However, challenges remain in these measurements, especially around quantifiable accuracy and in reactive flows. This project aims to enable quantitative 3D3C velocity measurements in reactive flows to pave the way for the design of cleaner energy solutions. In addition, the project will be integrated into the researchers’ daily teaching activities, K-12 outreach activities, design projects, and industrial collaborations.Scientifically, the project will concentrate on one issue: the poorly-understood uncertainties of our current 3D3C velocimetry techniques in reactive flows. This project proposes to resolve this issue and enable quantitative 3D3C velocity measurements in 3 progressive steps. Step I aims at understanding existing techniques’ uncertainties at a fundamental level. This step will design novel experiments so that the ground truth velocity can be known a priori and the errors can be directly quantified. Based on Step I, Step II then aims at inventing new strategies to significantly improve the accuracy of 3D3C velocimetry. Preliminary results have identified several promising ideas including new tomographic reconstruction algorithms and active correction of beam-steering caused by turbulence. And finally, Step III proposes to apply the new understanding from Steps I and II and new strategies to interpret existing data to establish a new database with enhanced accuracy and well-defined error bars for the community. Velocity is the most basic property both as a key input and a key output for model comparison. The quantitative 3D3C results sought in this project are expected to be a valuable database for the research community, both to validate existing models and also to inspire new insights and new models.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.