Application of pre-positioning method in compressor cascade measurement with pressure-sensitive paint

The pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) technique has shown superiorities in its large coverage area capability and high spatial resolution. The process of the PSP technique usually requires sufficient illumination that covers the entire test object, and a camera that acquires the particular excited fluorescence. Applications in internal flow study, like the compressor cascade, may fail as the optical access is heavily limited due to the closely adjacent components, which creates a high demand for spatial positioning arrangement of optical devices in the visualization system. In this work, a pre-positioning method was proposed to help determine the arrangement of optical devices of an internal flow PSP measurement system in advance. It was applied to the measurement of a linear compressor cascade with large solidity. The results showed that with the optical layout arrangement determined using this pre-positioning method, a full-field pressure distribution of the cascade blade can be acquired successfully.