INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING MEASUREMENT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Meas. Sci. Technol. 12 (2001) 1576–1585 PII: S0957-0233(01)21660-9

Principle and applications of the

background oriented schlieren (BOS)
method
H Richard and M Raffel
Institut für Aerodynamik und Strömungstechnik, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und
Raumfahrt (DLR), Bunsenstraße 10, 37073 Göttingen, Germany

Received 5 February 2001, accepted for publication 27 June 2001

Published 16 August 2001
Online at stacks.iop.org/MST/12/1576
Abstract
The practical aspects of an advanced schlieren technique, which has been
presented by Meier (1999) and Richard et al (2000) and in a similar form by
Dalziel et al (2000), are described in this paper. The application of the
technique is demonstrated by three experimental investigations on
compressible vortices. These vortices play a major role in the blade vortex
interaction (BVI) phenomenon, which is responsible for the typical
impulsive noise of helicopters. Two experiments were performed in order to
investigate the details of the vortex formation from the blade tips of two
different helicopters in flight: a Eurocopter BK117 and a large US utility
helicopter. In addition to this, simultaneous measurements of velocity and
density fields were conducted in a transonic wind tunnel in order to
characterize the structure of compressible vortices.
The background oriented schlieren technique has the potential of
complementing other optical techniques such as shadowgraphy or focusing
schlieren methods and yields additional quantitative information.
Furthermore, in the case of helicopter aerodynamics, this technique allows
the effect of Reynolds number on vortex development from blade tips to be
studied in full-scale flight tests more easily than through the use of
laser-based techniques.

Keywords: fluid flow density, schlieren technique, flow visualization,

transonic wind tunnel, flight testing, helicopter aerodynamics
(Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)

1. Introduction feasible for large- or full-scale applications. Nevertheless,

Optical density visualization techniques such as schlieren
photography, shadowgraphy or interferometry are well known
and have been used world wide for many decades. The
techniques are sensitive to changes in refractive index and
allow variations in flow density to be observed.
Due to the delicate optical systems needed, these
techniques are usually used for studying small-or medium-
sized fields of view. Even though some researchers have
performed large-field and focusing schlieren photography and
shadowgraphy in the great outdoors (e.g. Bagai and Leishman
1993, Settles 1999, Weinstein 2000), most of these techniques
are confined to laboratories or to wind tunnels and are less
full-scale measurements are desirable if the flow is strongly
dependent on Mach number and Reynolds number.
This paper describes a technique which allows us to
determine density gradients without sophisticated optical
equipment. The technique has been successfully applied to
helicopters in hovering flight and to the transonic flow behind
a cylinder.
2. Principle of the background oriented schlieren
technique
The background oriented schlieren technique uses the relation
between the refractive index and the density of a gas is given

0957-0233/01/091576+10$30.00 © 2001 IOP Publishing Ltd Printed in the UK 1576

 Background oriented schlieren method

Figure 2. Focusing position and image blur.

index integrated along the optical path. Details on the theory

of ray tracing through gradient-index media were described by
Sharma et al (1982) and Doric (1990).
Figure 1. Sketch of the optical setup. Assuming paraxial recording and small deflection angles,
a formula for the image displacement y can be derived, which
is valid for density speckle photography as well as for the BOS
by the Gladstone–Dale equation. It can best be compared with
technique.
laser speckle density photography as described by Debrus et al
y = ZD Mεy (1)
(1972), Köpf (1972) and in improved versions by Wernekinck
and Merzkirch (1987) and Viktin and Merzkirch (1998). with M = zi /ZB the magnification factor of the background
In contrast to laser speckle velocimetry, where speckle and ZD the distance dot pattern—density gradient.
patterns are generated by a double exposure of highly seeded The image displacement y can be rewritten as
flows in a light sheet in order to determine flow velocity, in  
laser speckle density photography, laser speckle patterns are ZD
y = f εy (2)
generated in order to obtain density gradient information. Like ZD + ZA − f
interferometry, the laser speckle density photography relies
on an expanded parallel laser beam, which crosses through with ZA the distance from lens to object and f the focal length
a transonic flow field or—in more general terms—through of the lens.
an object containing refractive index changes. However, in Since the imaging system has to be focused onto the
contrast to interferometry, laser speckle patterns are generated background, the following formula applies:
instead of interference fringes. 1 1 1
White light based flow visualization techniques for the = + . (3)
f zi Z B
determination of density gradients are most frequently called
schlieren1 techniques (Merzkirch 1974) and can be subdivided Equation (3) shows that a large image displacement can be
into different methods, e.g. the Toepler method and large-field obtained for a large ZD and small zA . The maximum image
and focusing schlieren methods (Settles 2001). Therefore, the displacement for ZD ⇒ ∞ approaches y = f εy .
technique described in this article will be referred to as the On the other hand certain restrictions in the decrease of ZA
background oriented schlieren (BOS) technique. have to be fulfilled in order to image the flow field sufficiently
Compared to the optical techniques mentioned above, the sharply.
BOS method simplifies the recording. The speckle pattern, As already mentioned the optical system has to be focused
usually generated by the expanded laser beam and ground on the background in order to obtain maximum contrast at high
glass, is replaced by a pattern on a surface in the background spatial frequencies for later interrogation, and equation (3)
of the test volume. This pattern has to have a high spatial applies. On the other hand, sharp imaging of the density
frequency that can be imaged with high contrast. It usually gradients would be best at zi with
consists of tiny, randomly distributed dots. The recording has
to be performed as follows: first a reference image is generated 1 1 1
=  + . (4)
by recording the background pattern observed through air at f zi ZA
rest before the experiment. In the second step an additional
exposure through the flow under investigation (i.e. during the By introducing the aperture diameter dA and the magnification
wind tunnel run) leads to a displaced image of the background of the density gradient imaging M  = zi /ZA a formula for the
pattern. The resulting images of both exposures can then be blur di of a point at ZA can be obtained:
evaluated by correlation methods. Without any further effort  
1
existing evaluation algorithms, which have been developed di = dA 1 + M  (f − ZA ) . (5)
and optimized e.g. for particle image velocimetry (or other f
forms of speckle photography), can then be used to determine
Since correlation techniques average over the interrogation
background image displacements.
windows, the image blur di does not lead to a significant loss
As stated previously, the deflection of a single beam
of information, as long as di is considerably smaller than the
contains information about the spatial gradient of the refractive
interrogation window size.
1 The German word Schliere designates a local optical inhomogeneity in a Figure 3 shows an example of a BOS measurement taken
transparent medium. of a Bunsen burner. The left-hand side shows the reference

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H Richard and M Raffel

Figure 3. Example of a BOS image pair.

Displacement
magnitude 0.2 0.4 0.5 0.7 0.8 1.0 1.1 1.3 1.5 1.6 1.8 1.9 2.1 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.7

1000

750
Y [pixel]

500

Figure 5. Photograph of the camera position.

250

3.1. Tests on helicopters in flight

0 First tests were performed in order to verify the feasibility of

0 250 500 750 1000
X [pixel]
Figure 4. Magnitude of the displacement which is proportional to
dρ/dx and dρ/dy.
image, which was recorded before starting the burner. The
right-hand side of figure 3 shows the corresponding BOS
image with the burner on. The temperature of the flame was
approximately 1500 ◦ C. The flame itself was shining with a
blue light, but had a very low intensity compared with the
background illumination and can therefore not be seen on the
recording. No significant blur of the background pattern due
to the flame has been observed.
Figure 4 shows the displacement magnitude computed
by a cross-correlation of the images shown in figure 3. The
displacement is directly proportional to the geometric sum
of dρ/dx and dρ/dy integrated over the line of sight (see
equations (1)–(5)).
3. Application of the BOS method to compressible
vortices
The background oriented technique was successfully applied
to study different types of flow (Raffel et al 2000, Dalziel
et al 2000). In this section three measurements are presented:
two blade tip vortex investigations and a vortex investigation
behind a cylinder.
BOS for large-scale aerodynamic investigations. The subject
helicopter—a Eurocopter BK117—departed from the grounds
of the DLR centre Göttingen. Progressive scan CCD cameras,
with a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels at 8 frames per
second, were previously mounted in a window of a building at
a horizontal distance of 32 m from the helicopter and 11.2 m
above the ground (see figure 5).
A random dot pattern was generated by splashing tiny
droplets of white wall paint (between 1 and 10 mm diameter)
with a brush onto the concrete ground. More than 50 digital
images were recorded within 20 seconds of hover flight. The
exposure time was set to 100 μs.
The reference recordings were made directly after the
departure of the helicopter. Even if acceptable results
could be obtained by using a standard cross-correlation
displacement measurement software, as developed for PIV,
more sophisticated programs helped to adapt the peak-fitting
routine to the size of the dot images. The best results
were obtained by using an iterative Levenberg–Marquardt
fit to a 10 × 10 pixel area, where the correlation values
are weighted according to the Fisher transform (for details
see Ronneberger et al 1998). The size of the interrogation
window was 20 × 20 pixels (2.4 by 1.8 cm in the rotor plane)
searched in a window of 64 × 64 pixels. The evaluation
led to the vector plots shown in figures 7 and 8, which were
obtained by a massive oversampling using a 5 pixel step-width,
resulting in an improved visibility of the flow structures under
investigation.

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 Background oriented schlieren method

Figure 6. Example of BOS recording: reference picture (left) and during the hover flight (right).

Figure 7. Displacement field proportional to dρ/dx and dρ/dy from the previous pictures.

Figure 8. Displacement field proportional to dρ/dx and dρ/dy and zoom of the tip vortex overlapping region.

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H Richard and M Raffel
Figure 9. Photographs of the tower and of the helicopter in hover flight.
Figure 10. Displacement fields proportional to dρ/dx and dρ/dy.
In figure 7 (left-hand side) a young vortex shed from the
blade that has just passed the observation area can easily be
detected as well as the vortices produced by previous blades:
after their generation, the blade tip vortices do not dissipate or
diffuse for many rotor revolutions. The perspective projection
led to an elliptical appearance of the vortex axes in the image
plane. The line of lower density, which can be defined as the
vortex centre, is also clearly visible on the zoom view (right-
hand side).
Since the cameras were not synchronized with the
helicopter rotor blades, the blades do not appear on all
recordings and it is therefore impossible to distinguish between
the vortex generated by the blade just passing and the vortices
from previous blades. If the vortices are overlapping on the
camera’s field of view (figure 8), the BOS technique does not
allow us to obtain a defined path (zoom view on the right-hand
side).
Further investigations were carried out in order to study
the blade tip vortex of a large US utility helicopter using an
identical setup except that the cameras were located on the
control tower close to the runway of Moffett Field at the NASA
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Ames research centre in California. The tests at Ames have
been performed in close cooperation between the DLR and the
Aeromechanics Branch US-Army/NASA Rotorcraft Division
in order to test the feasibility of reaching larger observation
distances, and higher spatial resolutions, and to investigate the
interactions between the exhaust plume and the main rotor.
Figure 10 shows two results of the blade tip vortices
interacting with the exhaust plume produced by the turbine
engine. Stereoscopic recordings, combined with larger fields
of view, allow the interactions of main rotor vortices, the
exhaust plume and the tail rotor to be studied during future
investigations.
Furthermore, these tests demonstrated that the background
does not necessarily have to be artificially generated. Figure 11
shows a BOS recording using the grass of the airfield as
background instead of an artificially generated dot pattern
background. The camera was focused on the grass which
bordered the runway 100 m behind the helicopter. This
distance was sufficiently large to prevent the grass from moving
due to the flow generated by the helicopter. One vortex—
between the two blades—can be identified in figure 11.

Figure 11. BOS pictures and displacement field using background grass.
3.2. Measurements of compressible vortices in the wake of a
cylinder
The experiment described next was set up in order to study
compressible vortex flows involved in the BVI phenomena
of helicopter rotors in more detail. Therefore, the vortex
shedding on a cylinder with a diameter of 25 mm in a transonic
wind tunnel has been investigated by simultaneous velocity
and density gradient measurements at different free-stream
Mach numbers. This information was complemented by
additional measurements of the unsteady pressure fluctuations
at different locations along the wind tunnel walls. These
data enable a more detailed analysis of compressible vortices
than successive measurements of single quantities, because
they require certain assumptions to be made in order to
describe the gas dynamics of compressible vortices. However,
a detailed description of compressible vortices plays a key
role in numerical simulations, which are aimed at by many
research organizations for a further improved prediction of
helicopter noise. The measurement of the velocity induced
by the vortex is needed, since the amplitude of the pressure
waves which are emitted during the interaction of the vortex
with a blade is proportional to the circulation of the vortex.
In the past the velocity information has been derived by
simultaneous pressure and density measurements (see e.g.
Mandella and Bershader 1987). Therefore, it had to be
assumed that the vortex is moving with constant convection
speed, that it is symmetrical with respect to its axis and that
the vortex can be described by a solution of the stationary
Euler equations, which means that the vortex moves without a
significant influence of dissipation. Even if those assumptions
are valid they limit the accuracy of the experimental results.
Furthermore, the spatial–temporal derivatives of the pressure
signal, which have to be computed in order to derive the
induced velocities, amplify the noise and uncertainties of
the data. The situation can be improved by simultaneous
measurements of pressure, density and velocity fields. The
setup needed for the BOS measurements was composed by
one camera looking through the test section and a light source,
which illuminates a background paper containing a dot pattern
(figure 1). The dot pattern was generated by printing a
Background oriented schlieren method
single exposure PIV recording on a laser printer. The size
of the dots was approximately 1 mm, and the size of the
interrogation window backprojected into the observation area
was 25 mm2 on average. Two different light sources were used:
a continuous white light and a stroboscope light synchronized
with the camera.
These two light sources produced different results. The
results which are shown first represent the averaged density
fields and were obtained with continuous light. Figure 12
shows displacement fields using continuous light for different
Reynolds numbers.
The density gradients are visibly increasing with
increasing Mach and Reynolds numbers and the region of
the shear layers above and below the cylinder can clearly be
detected on the density gradient field for Red = 270 000 (c) and
Red = 335 000 (d). Intermittent compression shock waves,
however, cannot be observed. They are typically generated in
a Mach number range between 0.6 and 0.8, but are smeared out
due to the long integration times used for these experiments.
However, the increase of density gradients and the expected
decrease of density behind the cylinder with increasing Mach
and Reynolds number can clearly be seen in figure 13.
The displacement field can be integrated in order to obtain
a distribution which is proportional to the density distribution
under the assumption of a two-dimensional flow field. Two
integration methods can be used: either through the solution of
the Poisson equation (Richard et al 2000) or by line integration.
The second method which is the simplest to implement, has
the disadvantage of producing line noise. Figure 13 shows
the line extracted (left-hand side) from the displacement field
(figure 12) at x = 1.5 cm and the result after integration (right-
hand side). It shows that the displacement increases while the
density decreases with Reynolds number and shows an almost
perfect symmetry in relation to the centre of the cylinder with
a lowest density for y = 4 cm.
The cylinder diameter has been chosen in order to restrict
the ratio between cylinder diameter d and its span s to d/s =
1/4. As can be seen by comparing the averaged and the
instantaneous results (figures 12–14), the vortex wake for this
set of parameters is highly unsteady. This demonstrates the
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H Richard and M Raffel

Displacement Displacement
magnitude (mm) magnitude (mm)
0.000 0.014 0.028 0.042 0.056 0.070 0.085 0.099 0.113 0.127 0.141 0.000 0.014 0.028 0.042 0.056 0.070 0.085 0.099 0.113 0.127 0.141

0.1 mm 0.1 mm
7 7

6 6

5 5
Y [cm]

Y [cm]
4 4

3 3

2 2

1 1

0 0
0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 8
X [cm] X [cm]
(a) (b)
Displacement Displacement
magnitude (mm) magnitude (mm)
0.000 0.014 0.028 0.042 0.056 0.070 0.085 0.099 0.113 0.127 0.141 0.000 0.014 0.028 0.042 0.056 0.070 0.085 0.099 0.113 0.127 0.141

0.1 mm 0.1 mm
7 7

6 6

5 5
Y [cm]

Y [cm]

4 4

3 3

2 2

1 1

0 0
0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 8
X [cm] X [cm]
(c) (d)
Figure 12. Displacement fields in continuous light, Red : 125 000 (a), 155 000 (b), 270 000 (c) and 335 000 (d), and Ma∞ = 0.29,
Ma∞ = 0.34, Ma∞ = 0.64 and Ma∞ = 0.79 respectively.

Figure 13. Line extracted from figure 12 and from the integrated fields at x = 1.5 cm.

need for instantaneous measurements and makes simultaneous Figure 15 shows the setup needed in order to perform BOS
velocity and density gradient fields desirable. and PIV measurements at the same time, which allows us to
The advantage of the BOS technique is that it can very obtain velocity and density information simultaneously. It is
easily be coupled with particle image velocimetry (PIV). composed of two cameras, one used for PIV and the other for

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 Background oriented schlieren method

Displacement
magnitude (mm)
0.000 0.014 0.028 0.042 0.056 0.070 0.085 0.099 0.113 0.127 0.141

0.1 mm
7

5
Y [cm]

0
0 2 4 6 8
X [cm]

Figure 14. Displacement field obtained from the recording with strobed light.

Figure 15. Sketch of the optical setup to perform BOS and PIV measurements at the same time.

Displacement
magnitude (mm) vorticity
0.000 0.005 0.011 0.016 0.021 0.027 0.032 0.038 0.043 0.048 -45000 -32142.9 -19285.7 -6428.57 6428.57 19285.7 32142.9 45000

0.1 mm 150 m/s

8 8

7 7

6 6

5 5
Y [cm]
Y [cm]

4 4

3 3

2 2

1 1

0 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
X [cm] X [cm]

Figure 16. Simultaneously recorded BOS result of the displacement field, magnitude colour coded (left), and the velocity and vorticity
fields (colour coded) obtained by PIV (right).

1583
H Richard and M Raffel

Y [cm] 5 5

Y [cm]
4 4

3 3

5 6 7 8 5 6 7
X [cm] X [cm]

Figure 17. Displacement (left) and velocity (right) fields.

8 8

7 7

6 6

5 5
Y [cm]

Y [cm]

4 4

3 3

2 2

1 1

0 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
X [cm] X [cm]

Figure 18. Iso-density lines (black) with iso-vorticity contours (left) and shear strain contours (right).

BOS. Both cameras have the same field of view and are looking
through a polarized beam splitter, which blocks the light from
the laser sheet for the BOS camera.
The PIV camera was focused on the laser light sheet plane,
whereas the BOS camera was focused onto the background dot
pattern.
The stroboscope light was synchronized with the second
pulse of the laser. The background of the second image is
therefore brighter than the first, but the quality of the correlation
data was not significantly reduced.
Figure 16 shows an example of BOS and PIV results for
Red = 211 000. Various phenomena can be clearly identified
in both results, e.g. separation of the boundary layer, shear layer
and vortex shedding. Figure 17 shows a zoom of a region where
a vortex is visible: in the BOS result, the vectors are diverging
from the centre of the vortex, which corresponds to an area of
lower density.
In figure 18, the iso-density contours, as derived by
the line integration of the BOS results, and the vorticity
contours derived from the PIV results, are displayed. The
advantage of the vorticity operator is that the location of
vortices can be displayed without the knowledge of their
convection speed, as the operator is translation invariant. It
can be seen that vorticity and density gradients are present
in similar regions of the flow field, but they do not perfectly
overlap. It has to be considered that density gradients can
be caused by pressure variations—e.g. in a vortex—or by
temperature changes. Temperature changes at these conditions
are typically generated by dissipation and are then convected
further downstream.
The location of the heat production—but not the
transportation of heat due to convection—can be seen on the
plot of the shear stress in figure 18 (right-hand side).
4. Conclusions
The measurements demonstrate the feasibility of the
BOS technique for different applications, even large-scale
applications, by visualizing the blade tip vortices of helicopters
in flight. It is expected that geometric parameters such as the
location of the vortex relative to the rotor plane, the orientation
of the vortex axis in space and its strength can be derived during
future tests. In spite of the difficult experimental conditions
density gradient data were obtained, which allow visualization
of the density fields with quite a promising spatial resolution.
Compared to the previous measurements, the time needed
for setup and data acquisition can be considerably decreased.
However, since a single camera system is capable of measuring
only two components of the spatial density gradient integrated
along the optical path, data such as the position or orientation
of the vortex axis in three-dimensional space cannot be derived

1584

without changing the viewing direction. Assuming a radially
symmetric density distribution in the vortex, the use of a
second camera in a stereoscopic arrangement would allow the
determination of the location of the density gradient in space.
After having demonstrated the feasibility of the concept
by its application to a technologically relevant but fluid
mechanically complex problem, more detailed studies
of vortices behind a cylinder have been performed in
order to reduce the complexity of the vortical structures
under investigation and to perform simultaneous velocity
measurements. These measurements will allow a more
accurate modelling of vortices in future aero-acoustic
prediction codes for helicopters. Furthermore, the feasibility
of using a ‘natural background’ such as grass at a relatively
large background distance as well as the feasibility of a
reference-free stereoscopic technique (Raffel et al 2000),
enabling the cameras to be mounted on board the helicopter
during future tests, confirm the usefulness of the technique.
Acknowledgments
The principle of BOS was proposed by G E A Meier. We
greatly appreciate his suggestions and his support for our
activities. The authors would also like to thank the pilot,
the engineers and the technicians of Eurocopter Deutschland
(ECD) and the DLR’s Institute for Aeroelasticity for their
cooperation. Many thanks also to Ken McAlister, Alex
Sheikman and the people of the flight crew such as Major
D Arterburn at NASA Ames and finally to everyone who took
part in the cylinder measurements: S Loose, K Ehrenfried,
F Klinge and J Agocs.
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