Simulation of flame temperature reconstruction through multi-plenoptic camera techniques

Due to the variety of burner structure and fuel mixing, the flame temperature distribution is not only manifold but also complex. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an advanced temperature measurement technique, which can provide not only the adequate flame radiative information but also reconstruct the complex temperature accurately. This paper presents a comprehensive simulation of flame temperature reconstruction through multi-plenoptic camera techniques. A novel multi-plenoptic camera imaging technique is proposed which is able to provide adequate flame radiative information only from two different directions and to reconstruct the three dimensional (3D) temperature of a flame. An inverse algorithm i.e., Non-negative Least Squares is used to reconstruct the flame temperature. To verify the reconstruction algorithm, two different temperature distributions such as unimodal axisymmetric and bimodal asymmetric are used. Numerical simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of the technique. It has been observed that the reconstruction accuracy decreases with the increasing of signal-to-noise ratios. However, compared with the single plenoptic and conventional multi-camera techniques, the proposed method has the advantages of lower relative error and better reconstruction quality and stability even with the higher SNRs for both temperature distributions. Therefore, the proposed multi-plenoptic camera imaging technique is capable of reconstructing the complex 3-D temperature fields more accurately.