Fast and Calibration-Free Temperature Imaging of Dynamic Flames via Wavelength Modulated Lateral Shearing Interferometry

Temperature distributions of dynamical flames were measured by using a proposed calibration-free wavelength modulated lateral shearing interferometry. A distributed feedback (DFB) laser was modulated in the wavelength as a sawtooth profile. The wrapped flame phase in the images was obtained pixel by pixel by calculating the phase shift between the interference light intensity profiles before and after flame ignition. Phase unwrapping and recovery were adopted to solve the flame phase distribution. The refractive index distribution was reconstructed with the help of inverse Abel transform. The temperature imaging was further achieved by the ideal gas law and Gladstone-Dale model. Numerical simulations were conducted for performance evaluations. The flame phase, refractive index, and temperature distributions were reconstructed with errors of 0.0094, 0.0154, and 0.0958, respectively. Standard deviations were in the magnitude of 10-4 at the presence of Gaussian random noises and showed the noise immunity of the proposed method. In actual experiments, reconstructed temperature distribution of a steady flame generated on a Bunsen burner agreed well with the thermocouple measurements. A dynamical process of flame extinguishment was portrayed at 1 kframes/s. Temporal variation of the flame temperature distribution well reflected the extinguishing process. The entire measurement process did not require prior calibration of the modulated wavelength, and the imaging speed was more than ten times faster than the existing phase modulated interferometer. The proposed method can be used for online evaluation of dynamic flames.