Propagation of laser beams carrying orbital angular momentum through simulated optical turbulence in Rayleigh-Bénard convection

Numerical simulations of a Rayleigh-Benard turbulent convective flow are examined to determine the optical and mechanical turbulence properties and resulting index of refraction and temperature structure function fields with the goal of understanding the propagation characteristics of a laser beam carrying orbital angular momentum. Beams carrying orbital angular momentum are a topic of interest for secure high data density free-space communications systems in both the atmosphere and underwater environment. The choice of Rayleigh-Benard convection provides a highly controllable configuration for studying optical turbulence and once the flow reaches a steady state, it may be treated as homogeneous. With a well characterized turbulent state provided by the simulations, attention is focused on the mechanics of beam propagation through the turbulence. Simulations are performed using the open source computational fluid dynamics package OpenFoam, a finite volume solver, and an in-house developed code that uses spectral methods. In the case of each solver, the Boussinesq approximation is used to model buoyancy and both the Navier-Stokes equations and the thermal energy equation are simultaneously solved. The outcome from the two computational schemes will be cross compared for result fidelity, spatial resolution, and computation time. The initial effort will examine air as the working medium in a domain with dimensions of 0.5 m on a side and a height of 0.1 m.