A joint experimental and computational study is being conducted to investigate the effects of vibrational non-equilibrium on supersonic combustion, although the focus of this paper is on mixing between a supersonic jet and a subsonic coflow. A new facility has been constructed that consists of a Mach 1.5 turbulent jet issuing into an electrically heated coflow. In the preliminary experiments reported here, air is used in both the jet and the coflow. The degree of non-equilibrium in the jet shear layers is quantified by using high-spectral resolution timeaverage spontaneous Raman scattering. The Raman scattering is complemented with planar temperature imaging using Rayleigh scattering. Much of the current work is focused on the extent to which vibrational non-equilibrium can be assessed by using time-averaged Raman scattering in a turbulent flow with large-scale temperature fluctuations. The experimental work is supported by direct numerical simulation of related jet flows. Preliminary DNS of turbulent jets in coflow with imposed vibrational non-equilibrium shows that vibrational relaxation effects have a first-order effect on the jet temperature field and mixing physics. Nomenclature= specific heat at constant volume of species, α = vibrational energy = projected pixel dimension in physical plane = convective Mach number = incident laser power = Rayleigh scattered power = partition function − = translational-vibrational energy exchange , = reference temperature by which is defined for species, α = rotational temperature = translational temperature = vibrational temperature = passive scalar concentration = visual shear layer thickness  = characteristic vibrational temperature of an oscillator  = reduced mass of colliding pair 2  = vibrational relaxation timescale Ø = mass fraction of species, α = mixture fraction of species, α = collection solid angle ( ) = Rayleigh scattering cross-section

A multiple-pass cell is aligned to focus light at two regions at the center of the cell. The two "points" are separated by 2.0 mm. Each probe region is 200 μm×300 μm. The cell is used to amplify spontaneous Raman scattering from a CH4-air laminar flame. The signal gain is 20, and the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio varies according to the number of laser pulses used for signal acquisition. The temperature is inferred by curve fitting high-resolution spectra of the Stokes signal from N2. The model accounts for details, such as the angular dependence of Raman scattering, the presence of a rare isotope of N2 in air, anharmonic oscillator terms in the vibrational polarizability matrix elements, and the dependence of Herman-Wallis factors on the vibrational level. The apparatus function is modeled using a new line shape function that is the convolution of a trapezoid function and a Lorentzian. The uncertainty in the value of temperature arising from noise, the uncertainty in the model input parameters, and various approximations in the theory have been characterized. We estimate that the uncertainty in our measurement of flame temperature in the least noisy data is ±9 K.