Make:

If it's so simple, how about a link telling us how?

dan

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Posted by: Sean Michael Ragan on July 22, 2009 at 11:28 AM

There are no online tutorials that I know of, but like I say, it's incredibly simple, as a minute's research reveals. From the Wikipedia article on Schlieren Photography:

"The basic optical schlieren system uses light from a single collimated source shining on, or from behind, a target object. Variations in refractive index caused by density gradients in the fluid distort the collimated light beam. This distortion creates a spatial variation in the intensity of the light, which can be visualised directly with a shadowgraph system."

Which amounts to:

"Make bright, focused shadows of the system you want to study and photograph them while the system is in operation."

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A quick google provided: http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-schlieren.html

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I googled for a bit and didn't find a whole lot of info for the DIYer, however this image gave me an idea:

http://www.americanscientist.org/Libraries/images/2005122153046_846.jpg

Use a tightly focused flash, small combiner and old projector screen and you should be able to make high speed Schlieren images with the high speed photo kit from the maker store.

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I have been playing around with this for about a year and have a web page up about it.

It IS simple.. once you figure out all the "obvious" things that tend to get left out when describing it. It took me a while to get all the details right, and shortly I hope to add to my page a better description of what is going on.

http://www.ian.org/Schlieren/

The only hard part to find is the mirror. A six inch spherical mirror from Edmund Optics will run about $50 which is not too bad. Mirrors get expensive FAST as they get bigger.

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