Reconstruction of the radial dependence of the structural characteristic of the refractive index in a supersonic gas flow from laser beam intensity fluctuations

A method for reconstructing the radial dependence of the structural characteristic of the refractive index of air in an axisymmetric supersonic gas flow from the variance of intensity fluctuations of a laser beam that is transmitted through the flow at different distances from the jet symmetry axis is proposed. An expression that relates the relative intensity variance on the beam axis as a function of the aiming distance and the radial dependence of the structural characteristic is obtained. To invert this expression, the Abelian transformation is used. The parameters of the jet module of an AT-326 wind tunnel at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences are modeled.