August 10, 2006 / Vol. 4, No. 8 / CHINESE OPTICS LETTERS 435
Evaluations on aero-optic effects of subsonic airborne
electro-optical system
Kexin Yin (
) and Huilin Jiang (
)
Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun 130022
Received February 24, 2006
A simple method based on CFD code and Matlab for aero-optic effects is presented. Density fluctuation
from CFD code due to the changes of such factors as altitude, speed, equipment location, and wavelength
is introduced as an input to Matlab. The overall calculations are in Matlab. The results show that the
p erformance of electro-optical (EO) system can be improved when the altitude increasing, the speed is as
slo w ly as possible, and the equipment location moves to the leading edge of the airborne platform as far
as possible, for the wavelength there is an optimum one when the indexes of contrast and resolution of the
system are both considered. All of these methods can minimize the optical aberrations. Several numerical
simulations demonstrate the method.
OCIS co des: 010.1330, 010.3310, 000.4430.
When an otherwise-collimated laser beam passes through
a turbulent flow with variable index of refraction, its
wavefront becomes dynamically aberrated. These aber-
rations degrade the beam’s ability focused on the far
field, so reducing the system utility of the beam that
may be used for communication. When the laser plat-
form is an aircraft, one of the causes of beam degradation
is the thin layer and immediate air flow around the air-
craft, which is referred to the aero-optic effects (see Fig.
1). It is necessary to quantitatively evaluate these degra-
dations for correct and reliable airborne electro-optical
(EO) system. A wide variety of different methods have
been developed for aero-optical measurements. Daniel
[1]
applied a Shack Hartman wavefront sensor to measure
the optical distortions caused by the density fluctuation.
Jiang
[2]
introduced a novel two-dimensional (2D) Hart-
man wavefront sensor to measure aero-optic effects when
the b eam passes through a low velocity heat turbulent
jet. The wind tunnel tests have been made successfully
in American since 1980s’ and until recently American
and Israel have cooperated to develop an “arrow” missile
that solved a series o f aero-optical problems and suc-
ceeded in the flying test
[3]
.Jumperet al. have demon-
strated a small aperture beam technique (SABT) for
quantifying the optical wavefront distortions imposed by
passing through the turbulent flow field
[4]
. The studies
of aero-optic field in China originated from 1990s’ and
made great progress, the investigative emphasis has b een
gradually transferred from the initial understanding of
aero-optical statistical characteristics to the mechanism.
Fig. 1. Schematic of TBL adhere to the airborne platform.
Though some facilities or techniques have been devel-
oped to test aero-optical wavefront distortions
[5−8]
,the
advances in aero-optical computational simulations have
not come as rapidly. The computational simulations play
a vital, complementary role in test planning as well as test
data interpretation. This paper introduces a simple com-
putational simulation methodology for evaluating aero-
optic effects around subsonic airborne EO system based
on the combination of CFD code and Matlab. Several
numerical simulations that demonstrate the method are
presented. The results show that the proposed method
can easily assess the aero-optic effects around airborne
EO system and make useful predictions or corrections.
Density fluctuation is a key parameter for evaluat-
ing aero-optic effects in aerodynamic flow field. In
the present study, we use FLUENT
[9]
to produce den-
sity fluctuation. FLUENT is a m ultiblock CFD code,
which can solves the three-dimensional (3D) Navier-
Stokes equations. Here flow is turbulent and a regular
k-ε model is chosen as current flig ht conditions. Several
parameters such as altitude (affects pressure and density)
and Mach number must b e s pecified in FLUENT simula-
tion. Then the turbulent effects are calculated based on
turbulent model. The output data of FLUENT code are
a discrete set of air density values on an unstructured grid
and are resolved in a fluid density file for later use. In
this paper we use ICEM CFD 4.1.3 mesh generator that
is a multiblock grid generator to produce computational
mesh and we make sure that the grid around the win-
dow is dense enough. With the comprehensive studies,
it has been found that the density fluctuation in turbu-
lent boundary layer (TBL) is determined by the density
difference (between wall density and free stream density)
that comes from the flow velocity variations due to the
increases of the temperature and the fluid speed in the
boundary layer. We have an assumption that the density
discontinuity occurs in TBL, the peak density is in the
middle of overall TBL, and its average value is 10% of
this density difference, defined by
[10]
ρ
average
∼
=
ρ
∼
=
|ρ
w
− ρ
0
|×10%, (1)
where ρ
w
is wall density and ρ
0
is free stream density.
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