Liquid sprays are found in multiple industrial environments. Apart from sprayers, humidifiers and agricultural applications, sprays are widely used by power generation technologies. In particular, internal combustion engines as well as gas turbines for ground and aeronautical applications and rocket engines introduce the liquid fuel as a spray of fine droplets to minimize fuel-oxidant mixing times.

The objective of this project is the development, construction and testing of a prototype novel instrument able to produce faster than present, more accurate flow measurements for the characterization of industrial, optically dense liquid sprays. To achieve this goal a non-intrusive analysis of the spray's light scattering activity will be performed by using two complementary experimental techniques:

- off-axis laser light droplet scattering (LD), to obtain at each point within the spray a measure of the number density;
- Phase-Doppler (PD) interferometry, to obtain the droplets size distribution and velocity.

Manipulation of both data sets will generate the spray flow information in the harsh optical conditions encountered in industrial sprays (typical droplets with diameters in the range 10 < D < 150 mm).