Rotating Machinery

PSP is a promising technique for measuring the surface pressure distributions on high-speed rotating blades in turbomachinery where conventional techniques are particularly difficult to use. Using a laser scanning system, Burns and Sullivan

(1995) measured the pressure distributions on a small wooden propeller at a rotational speed of 3120 rpm and a TRW Hartzell propeller at a rotational speed of 2360 rpm. Mosharov et al. (1997) obtained the pressure distributions on propellers using a CCD camera system with a pulse light source. PSP measurements on helicopter rotor blades were carried out at TsAGI (Bukov et al. 1997; Mosharov et al. 1997) and NASA Ames (Schairer et al. 1998b). Navarra et al. (1998) obtained pressure images on a rotor blade using an ICCD camera system. Hubner et al. (1996) suggested a lifetime imaging method for PSP measurements on a rotating object based on detecting the luminescent decay traces of a rotating painted surface on a CCD camera. Here, we describe two typical PSP measurements on rotating blades where a laser scanning system and a CCD camera system were used respectively.