IIHR- Hydroscience & Engineering
College of Engineering, The University of Iowa
 

 
Whole-field flow measurement is necessary for determination of velocity and vorticity vectors for unsteady flows. Particle-image velocimetry (PIV) provides instantaneous velocity measurement over a planar slice of a flow field. The IIHR PIV system runs on a dedicated IBM RISC 6000 workstation and utilizes a double- pulsed Nd:YAG laser for generation of the laser sheet. Image acquisition can be performed either by a CCD video camera (with 1K x 1 K pixel resolution) or by a still camera with electronically controlled shutter that is synchronized with laser pulsing. The velocity vectors are obtained using a digital auto-correlation technique in which the flow domain is subdivided into a grid of "interrogation regions" and auto-correlation is employed within each interrogation region to determine the most like translation of the particles over the time increment. One velocity vector measurement is obtained for each interrogation region. A rotating mirror technique is used to remove directional ambiguity.

 

Researchers examining vortex flow velocity fields using particle-image velocimetry instrumentation.
Sample PIV Data

A variety of different PIV systems are employed at IIHR, each of which has advantages depending on specific applications. The double-pulsed YAG system allows a great deal of flexibility in specification of the time increment between images, thus allowing accurate velocity measurement over a wide range of flow speeds, making the system useful in either water or air flows.

More Information

For more information about the IIHR double YAG PIV system, please contact Prof. Jeff Marshall.


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This page was last updated on August 5th, 2008