Numerical study on aero-optical imaging deviations of vehicles at different altitudes

Abstract

When the vehicle is flying in the atmosphere at high speed, the optical head and the atmosphere will have severe friction, thus forming a complex flow field, which makes the target image shift in the optical imaging system. The influence of altitude on aero-optical imaging deviation is studied in this paper. The geometric modeling and mesh generation of a typical blunt nosed high-speed vehicle were carried out, and the three-dimensional (3D) flow field density was obtained by a large amount of computational fluid dynamic calculation. In order to complete the optical calculation, the backward ray tracing method and the backward ray tracing stop criterion were used. The results show that as the height increases, the imaging deviation decreases gradually, and the imaging deviation slope increases and tends to be flat and close to zero.