The development of an optical Doppler technique for measuring flow velocities

For a generalized scheme of LDV, the expressions describing the light intensity distribution in a photo-receiver plane with regard to the size of the scattering particles have been calculated using Fourier optics.The LDV signal should be considered as a narrow-band stochastic process representing the sum of random phase radio frequency pulses arising from each light scattering particle. Then the expected error of the mean velocity measurement is equal to half the reciprocal of the number of interference fringes squared and the input signal-to-noise ratio is equal to the square root of the product of Doppler frequency, fringe number and averaging time.The device developed by the authors includes d.c. optical signal compensation. The device is described and the results of its use are given.