| We have developed and verified a gust-monitoring device based on laser forward-scattering. Traditional anemometers such as weather instruments do not meet the requirements for real-time, in-situ sensing on-board an in-flight airplane. Our setup exposes a 1/2 meter propagation path of a laser beam to free space where there is air flow. Using a low noise photodetector chip, which has an integrated transimpedance amplifier with 50 kHz bandwidth, the AC aspect of the laser beam intensity fluctuations is captured. Four flight experiments were conducted with the F-15B/FTF-II at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. Data processing and refinements were done in the UCLA Flight Systems Research Center. Upon calibration against existing anemometers, more field testing were performed on the NASA Dryden RoadRunner Ground Research Vehicle. Digital analysis yielded patterns and spatial spectrums of the wind for correlation and verification. |
