In the aviation industry, there is an urgent need for a thorough understanding of turbine combustion to improve turbine engine efficiency and reduce combustion emissions. Tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy is a widely used method for in situ, noninvasive, quantitative and fast detection of combustion species, temperature, and velocity. By incorporating tomographic methods, the line-of-sight absorption spectroscopy method can be extended to rapid 2D and 3D imaging of various combustion flow fields. However, the field deployment of this technique in actual aero-engines is quite rare. Recently, a consortium of university research teams and industrial partners from UK and Spain successfully reported the use of a large-scale laser-absorption tomography system to measure CO₂ distributions in the exhaust plume of a Rolls-Royce modern Trent engine. The laser diagnostic system contains 126 near-infrared (~2 µm) optical beams (6 angular projections × 21 parallel beams) mounted on a 7-m diameter frame, which allows a spatial resolution of ~60 mm. By monitoring the combustion flow located 3-m downstream of the engine exit nozzle, the authors successfully demonstrate the tomographic imaging of the spatial distribution of CO₂ at 1.25 fps. This work opens the door to the improved understanding of large-scale turbine combustion.

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