Density and temperature reconstruction of a flame-induced distorted flow field based on background-oriented schlieren (BOS) technique

An experimental system based on the background-oriented schlieren (BOS) technique is built to reconstruct the density and temperature distribution of a flame-induced distorted flow field which has a density gradient. The cross-correlation algorithm with sub-pixel accuracy is introduced and used to calculate the background-element displacement of a disturbed image and a fourth-order difference scheme is also developed to solve the Poisson equation. An experiment for a disturbed flow field caused by a burning candle is performed to validate the built BOS system and the results indicate that density and temperature distribution of the disturbed flow field can be reconstructed accurately. A notable conclusion is that in order to make the reconstructed results have a satisfactory accuracy, the inquiry step length should be less than the size of the interrogation window.