Based on the measurement of one-dimensional （1D） optical path difference （OPD） of the supersonic turbulent bound- ary layer, an analytical form for the power spectrum of the two-dimensional （2D） OPD is obtained with its structure function and under the locally homogeneous isotropic assumption. The universality of this spectrum is argued, and its validity is checked by the comparison with experimental result. The potential applications of this model in theoretical and numerical studies are emphasized. Another contribution of this work is around the application of correlation function to analyzing the statistics of OPD. Based on our results and other results published elsewhere, we show that the OPD is often not stationary, and one should be cautious about using this tool.
The density distribution of a supersonic turbulent boundary layer is measured with the nanoparticle-based planar laser scattering technique, and the temporal evolution of its optical path difference （OPD） in a short time interval is characterized by proper orthogonal decomposition （POD）. Based on the advantage of POD in capturing the energy of a signal, a temporal evolution model is suggested for the POD coefficients of the OPD. In this model, the first few coefficients vary linearly with time, and the others are modeled by Gaussian statistics. As an application, this method is used to compute the shortexposure optical transfer function.
The nano-particle-based planar laser scattering （NPLS） technique is used to measure the density distribution in the supersonic mixing layer of the convective Mach number 0.12, and the optical path difference （OPL）, which is quite crucial for the study of aero-optics, is obtained by post processing. Based on the high spatiotemporal resolutions of the NPLS, the structure of the OPL is ana]ysed using wavelet methods. The coherent structures of the OPL are extracted using three methods, including the methods of thresholding the coefficients of the orthogonal wavelet transform and the wavelet packet transform, and preserving a number of wavelet packet coefficients with the largest amplitudes determined by the entropy dimension. Their performances are compared, and the method using the wavelet packet is the best. Based on the viewpoint of multifractals, we study the OPL by the wavelet transform maxima method （WTMM）, and the result indicates that its scaling behaviour is evident.
