ITERATIVE INVERSION OF PHASE-DOPPLER-ANEMOMETRY SIZE DISTRIBUTIONS FROM SPRAYS OF OPTICALLY INHOMOGENEOUS LIQUIDS

Using phase Doppler anemometry (PDA) to investigate sprays of opticall y inhomogeneous liquids leads to blurred measured size distributions. The blurring function is formed by performance of PDA measurements on single-size droplets generated by a piezoelectric droplet generator. T o obtain the undistorted droplet-size distributions, a constrained ite rative inversion algorithm is applied. The number of iteration steps t o achieve the best possible restoration is determined by the use of sy nthetically generated data that has noise properties similar to the me asured histograms. The obtained size distributions are checked by comp arison with undistorted measurement results of an atomized optical hom ogeneous liquid. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America