Bidirectional Schlieren imaging using dual-LED illumination and a lens aperture as a knife-edge.

Authors

Vimod Kumar, Manish Kumar

Published in

Optics letters. Volume 51. Issue 21. Pages 6127-6130. Nov 01, 2026. Epub Oct 19, 2026.

Abstract

In this Letter, we demonstrate that employing the Lens Aperture as a Knife-Edge (LAKE) with two identical LEDs has the distinct advantage of obtaining Schlieren images along two cutoff orientations. It is possible to control LED brightness to obtain a desirable weighted sum of both horizontal and vertical Schlieren cutoff images on each camera frame. Powering the LED sources by an affordable and programmable Arduino board enables a rapid switch between the horizontal and vertical Schlieren cutoffs that is exactly synced to the camera frames, resulting in a crosstalk-free Schlieren image sequence. Furthermore, with a little postprocessing, this monochrome image series can be easily transformed into a colorful sequence of bidirectional Schlieren images.

PMID:
42962140
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 31 Oct 2026.

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