Aero-Optics

Dear Colleagues,

Airborne aero-optical effects are caused by the spatial variations of the density field in the vicinity of the aircraft, resulting in the distortion of light propagating through the density-varying medium. As a result, aero-optical effects might have significant detrimental effects on the focusability of a laser-based system or impose additional blurring on an airborne imaging system. In recent years, with the significant advancements of both measurement techniques and numerical simulations, there has been significant progress made in properly quantifying and mitigating aero-optical effects. Yet, many challenges are still present. As aero-optical effects generally increase with the aircraft speed, it is particularly important that the scientific community study and mitigate their detrimental effects at supersonic and hypersonic speeds. The presence of shocks and other flow discontinuities in high-speed flows also creates challenges in properly quantifying the associated discontinues in wavefronts with existing wavefront sensors. Associated high frequencies of aero-optical distortions at high speeds render most existing adaptive-optic systems largely inefficient in the task of mitigating aero-optical effects. Finally, in addition to the direct influence of aero-optical effects on the outgoing laser beam, turbulent flows also typically impose unwanted mechanical motion of the optical components inside point-and-tracking systems via the aero-elastic mechanism, further deteriorating its performance.

This Special Issue is devoted to a wide variety of topics relevant to aero-optical effects. Authors are invited to submit full research articles or review manuscripts addressing (but not limited to) the following topics,

• Experimental characterization of aero-optical effects of fundamental and applied turbulent flows over a wide range of speeds, including hypersonic ones
• High-fidelity simulations of aero-optical effects
• Characterization of aero-optical jitter
• Novel experimental techniques and reconstruction algorithms to quantify aero-optical effects in the presence of shock-related and other discontinuities
• Image blurring due to aero-optical effects
• Novel approaches to mitigate aero-optical effects for airborne systems
• Quantification and mitigation of aero-optical and aero-mechanical jitter
• Mitigation techniques using flow control
• Effect of cooling over windows at high speeds on aero-optical performance
• Pointing and tracking performance in the presence of aero-optical effects
• Advancements in adaptive-optic systems to mitigate aero-optical effects

The focal topics listed above should not exclude articles from additional related areas. We are looking forward to receiving your submissions and invite you to contact the Guest Editor should you have further questions. 

Dr. Stanislav Gordeyev
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Aerospace is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• aero-optical effects
• optical distortion
• wavefront sensors
• adaptive-optics systems
• high-fidelity simulations
• aero-optical mitigation
• image blurring
• aero-optical jitter
• aero-mechanical jitter
• flow control
• cooled windows