Flow and Spray Imaging

Different kinds of flows and sprays are performing essential functions in numerous of applications in industrial processes, medical applications and even inside consumer products like inkjet printers. Flow and spray imaging can be applied in order to study and monitor liquid and gaseous flow parameters or process objects like droplets, bubbles and different kind of particles. When imaging flows and sprays the objects of interest are typically very small and fast, or they can even be embedded in dense and opaque liquids. Motion blur becomes more severe as the speed of the object increases. The effect is further increased if the magnification of the image increases like in microscopic applications. The camera exposure time can be a limiting factor when choosing cameras to visualize such processes, but the other way of reducing the blur and “freezing the motion” are very short light pulses. Optical solutions for the illumination play also an essential role in picking up desired information from the flow such as velocity or mixing of different phases. CAVILUX laser lighting offers very short pulses to monitor and visualize a wide range of applications in research and industry. These systems are also used in online monitoring systems where the growth of particles is measured to allow control of the processes. Wide variety of optical solutions for the light sources is available.