Contributed by the Fluids Engineering Division for publication in the JOURNAL OF FLUIDS ENGINEERING. Manuscript received by the Fluids Engineering Division March 11, 2004; revised manuscript received August 12, 2004. Review conducted by: M. Otugen.
Surface flow visualization is useful for understanding flow in many applications and can be used to complement and validate studies of complex flow using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). A recent development in non-intrusive surface flow visualization has been the development of “laser thermal tufts”. Baughn et al. 1 first described this technique in a study to determine where flow separation had occurred on the suction side of a turbine blade. This technique was later patented by the USAF (Rivir et al. 2). The principle behind this method was to use a laser to heat a spot on a surface coated with thermochromic liquid crystals (TLCs), showing up on an image of the surface...
