A rotating laser doppler velocimeter and some new results on the spin-up experiment

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Abstract
A laser Doppler velocimeter (LDV) has been successfully mounted on a high quality rotating turntable. The capability of this LDV is demonstrated by some detailed measurements of the relative flow during the spin-up of a homogeneous fluid in a cylinder. Local measurements in water of the zonal flow component of magnitude 0.1 cm/sec have been made with an error of about 0.003 cm/sec. The spatial resolution was about 0.1 cm and the temporal resolution about 0.5 Hz. Effects on the flow due to absorption of the low power laser beam (5 milliwatts) and to the low concentration (3 parts/million) of 0.5 micron diameter scattering particles were negligible. The results are compared with analytical theory and the agreement is good. For a Rossby number of 0.1, the weak inertial modes excited by the Ekman layer formation can be clearly seen and identified. The LDV offers great promise for checking numerical and analytical solutions against experiments. This is particularly true for contained flows where conventional probes often significantly disturb the flow.