Influence of exposure time on the aero-optical effects of a high-speed aircraft optical window

Under high-speed conditions (Mach number > 3), the turbulent shear layer formed on the optical window causes phase changes in the light, resulting in the aero-optical effects, which significantly affect the imaging quality at different exposure times, τ . In this study, imaging data of an optical window were collected in a Mach 3.8 supersonic low-noise wind tunnel for a facula and a USAF 1951 resolution board, as well as distorted wavefront data of visible light. As τ increases from 0.2 ms to 5 ms, the centroid jitter of the facula shows an overall decreasing trend and the increase of τ mainly inhibits the jitter in the spanwise direction. While τ varies from 0.2 ms to 28 ms, structural analysis indicated that the structural similarity and stability of imaging improves and this improvement has an upper limit of τ 0 = 22 ms, coined as the saturation exposure time. Normalized modulation transfer function curves derived from USAF 1951 images show a decrease in the imaging resolution as τ increases. The average wavefront distortion can be reduced by up to 71.7% as τ increases from 5 ms to 30 ms, while the standard deviation of wavefront distortion initially decreases and then stabilizes at 0.0025 λ .