UW-Madison Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor David Rothamer has designed and built a pulse-burst laser system that opens the door to new research opportunities for imaging turbulent reacting flows.

A faculty member of UW-Madison’s Engine Research Center, Rothamer studies combustion diagnostics and is particularly interested in developing new optical techniques to study combusting flows. Because the flows are dynamic and turbulent, and simultaneously have rapid chemical reactions occurring, typical cameras cannot capture them very well. Instead, researchers use a combination of laser-based imaging techniques and high-speed imaging using natural light emission from the combustion process.