New seeding methodology for gas concentration measurements

This paper presents the first demonstration of the pulsed laser ablation technique to seed a laminar non-reacting gaseous jet at atmospheric pressure. The focused, second harmonic from a pulsed Nd : YAG laser is used to ablate a neutral indium rod at atmospheric pressure and temperature. The ablation products generated with the new seeding method are used to seed the jet, as a marker of the scalar field. The neutral indium atoms so generated are found to be stable and survive a convection time of the order of tens of seconds before entering the interrogation region. The measurements of planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) with indium and laser nephelometry measurements with the ablation products are both reported. The resulting average and root mean square (RMS) of the measurements are found to agree reasonably well although some differences are found. The results show that the pulsed laser ablation method has potential to provide scalar measurement for mixing studies.