Non-invasive imaging system employs a laser light sheet to slice through a spray plume, and a digital camera to capture a high speed movie of the spray cloud as it passes through the plane
The need to look more deeply at sprays and aerosols is becoming urgent as government guidelines place ever more stringent requirements on manufacturers of fuel injectors, spray drying processes, powder coating, inkjet printers, paint sprays, fire extinguishers, domestic aerosols, medical devices and many other spray applications.
Designers and manufacturers need to know if spray particles/droplets are all landing in the target area; if they are being dispersed uniformly; if they form clusters with spaces between or if they all land in one spot.
Oxford Lasers says its range of VisiLase spray pattern analysis systems has been carefully designed to meet these challenges.
For example, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines on nasal sprays recommends the measurement of spray pattern, cone angle, plume geometry, and plume duration using wherever possible non-invasive methods.
The VisiLase V227 and V133 systems make optical, non-intrusive and repeatable measurements of all these parameters and others.
The non-invasive imaging system employs a laser light sheet to slice through a spray plume, and a digital camera to capture a high speed movie of the spray cloud as it passes through the illuminated sheet.
This movie is used to calculate the intensity of each image in order to determine spray pattern, size and shape, and plume geometry angle and orientation.
By using a short pulsed laser system, image quality is greatly improved and the range of information obtained is extended.
An aerosol plume is often moving at such high speeds that conventional lighting would result in problems with motion blur.
The pulsed laser completely eliminates motion blur from all the images.
The use of pulsed lasers also allows the facility for obtaining additional information on particle size distribution and flow field velocity, a facility that is unique to the Oxford Lasers systems.
The VisiLase systems use spray patternation EnVision software to analyse images.
EnVision software characterises either a single image or it can combine a sequence of frames to form a composite image.
It can measure the cone angle/plume geometry, cone/plume width, cone/plume height, ellipticity/ovality of pattern, size of pattern and event duration.
EnVision software is fully configurable via its unique tree structure which is easy to use and read and can be fully automated for quality control applications.
All data, results and the analysis procedure are stored in a single file, which can be electronically signed to provide greater security.
