Tomographic optical emission spectroscopy of a high enthalpy air plasma flow

A method is presented allowing for locally resolved emission spectroscopy using a tomographic setup. The approach presented in this work is applied to a high enthalpy air plasma flow. The resulting data sets allow for a three-dimensional (3D) representation of the non-symmetric flow field using photographs of the test section and 2D representation of the spectrally resolved radiance of the flow field. An analysis of different exposure times shows that transient fluctuations of the plasma can result in substantial asymmetry that approaches symmetry only for longer exposure times when the temporal averaging of the emission is significant. The spectral data allows the analysis of species selective excitation and emission. A non-equilibrium between atomic and molecular excitation temperatures is concluded for the investigated air plasma flow field. The spatial distribution of atomic electronic excitation temperatures are close to rotational symmetry while molecular rotational and vibrational temperatures exhibit asymmetric behavior.