Probing Dense Sprays with Gated, Picosecond, Digital Particle Field Holography

This is a proposal to develop a unique, robust, fieldable, gated, picosecond, digital holography system for characterizing dense particle fields under harsh conditions. Many powerful imaging methods have failed to fulfill this requirement because noise from multiple scattering buries the signal needed to acquire a useful image. Solutions to this limitation are very expensive, hard to implement, and not ideal candidates for field experiments. The proposed innovation applies digital holography and picosecond gating to limit the amount of noise sufficiently to enable high resolution, 3D imaging, effectively generalizing existing pseudo-ballistic imaging systems that have been demonstrated in dense fields. State of the art components in multiple fields are combined to produce a new sensor concept that will be extremely useful in the experimental study of dense sprays and other particles fields. Digital holography of this form can provide a detailed look at the structure of all of the particles in an essentially unlimited three dimensional sample volume.