Analysis of liquid surface deformation and breakups using three-dimensional high-speed data recorded with a single camera

Analyzing the deformation of liquid surfaces to better understand, for example, wave generation in oceanology or the formation of industrial spray systems, requires a series of three-dimensional snapshots that temporally resolve such events. This requirement is challenging, especially when applied to transient liquid surfaces that deform rapidly. A technique called Fringe Projection-Laser Induced Fluorescence (FP-LIF), developed by the authors, generates three-dimensional surface reconstructions of irregular liquid structures using snapshots recorded via a single camera only. In this article, FP-LIF is associated, for the first time, with a high-speed detection system, allowing the three-dimensional visualization of liquid surface deformation and breakups at a kHz frame rate. The technique is applied here at 20 kHz for imaging the complete development of a wide hollow-cone water spray and analyzing, in detail, the transition from early injection to stabilization. The three-dimensional image series covered a total time window of 300 ms (6000 frames). It is observed during the first 100 ms that the initial liquid jet deforms into a stable tulip shaped sheet. Then, between 100 and 180 ms, the tulip shape gradually grows until its stabilization corresponds to the final conical shaped sheet. Once the stabilization is reached, the fluctuation of the final spray-angle—ranging from 40° to 50°—is extracted by post-processing 1000 consecutive three-dimensional images, providing a detailed analysis of the radial symmetry of the spray over time and three-dimensional space. The results provided in this article are relevant for the validation of Computational Fluid Dynamics spray models.