Unburnt hydrocarbon flames produce soot, which is the second biggest contributor to global warming and harmful to human health. The state-of-the-art high-speed imaging techniques, developed to study non-repeatable turbulent flames, are limited to million-frames-per-second imaging rates, falling short in capturing the dynamics of critical species. Unfortunately, these techniques do not provide a complete picture of flame-laser interactions, important for understanding soot formation. Furthermore, thermal effects induced by multiple consecutive pulses modify the optical properties of soot nanoparticles, thus making single-pulse imaging essential. Here, we report single-shot laser-sheet compressed ultrafast photography (LS-CUP) for billion-frames-per-second planar imaging of flame-laser dynamics. We observed laser-induced incandescence, elastic light scattering, and fluorescence of soot precursors - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in real-time using a single nanosecond laser pulse. The spatiotemporal maps of the PAHs emission, soot temperature, primary nanoparticle size, soot aggregate size, and the number of monomers, present strong experimental evidence in support of the theory and modeling of soot inception and growth mechanism in flames. LS-CUP represents a generic and indispensable tool that combines a portfolio of ultrafast combustion diagnostic techniques, covering the entire lifecycle of soot nanoparticles, for probing extremely short-lived (picoseconds to nanoseconds) species in the spatiotemporal domain in non-repeatable turbulent environments. Finally, LS-CUP's unparalleled capability of ultrafast wide-field temperature imaging in real-time is envisioned to unravel mysteries in modern physics such as hot plasma, sonoluminescence, and nuclear fusion.
© 2023. The Author(s).