Automatic measurement of particles from holograms taken in the combustion chamber of a rocket motor

Abstract

This thesis describes the procedure used for the automatic measurement of particles from hologram taken in the combustion chamber of a rocket motor while firing. It describes the investigation done on two averaging techniques used to reduce speckle noise, capturing the image focused on a spinning mylar disk and software averaging of several image frames. The spinning disk technique proved superior for this application. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample test is applied to different particle samples in order to find an estimate of the number of particles required to obtain a stable distribution function. The number of particles is calculated and given. The last part of this study shows real particle distributions in the form of frequency histograms.