PIV AND STEREOPIV

Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Stereoscopic PIV are

anemometric, non-intrusive, two-dimensional techniques
that provide both qualitative and quantitative information on
the instantaneous velocity field of a fluid flow.
Two-dimensional
Two
dimensional techniques means that these techniques
give the instantaneous velocity field on a whole plane.
The standard Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV),
(PIV) which
makes use of a single camera, leads to the measurement of
the two in
in-plane
plane velocity components (2C).
The Stereoscopic PIV (STEREOPIV) , which makes use of
two cameras, instead, allows to compute all three velocity
components (3C).
Herein, some results obtained with both standard PIV and
STEREOPIV will be presented.

PIV TECHNIQUE
FIND

Mirror

Dual Pulse Laser

t first light pulse
t' second light pulse

Illuminated
particles

Flow with
tracer particles

i optics
i
Imaging

Dual Image Camera

image plane
t

s
t
t

t'

V = uii + vjj = s / (t
( - t))

x
y

PIV DATA REDUCTION

To compute the displacement field s of the particles in the
whole image, this latter is partitioned into a number of
(generally square) interrogation windows.
To find s the usual interrogation method performs a
standard cross-correlation of two homologous windows.
FT

I1I2*

FT -1

t+t
t

In order to do that, since some of the particles (that move)

leave the interrogation window, the dimension of these
windows has to be sufficiently large to include in the crosscorrelation process a relatively large number of particles.
particles
This leads to a relatively low number of velocity vectors
which can be computed and, therefore, to a poor spatial
resolution in determining the velocity field.

After obtaining the velocity field, the quality of the vectors must
be controlled with a data validation criterion applied, also later,
at each intermediate step of the iteration process.
A more refined iterative method starts as the standard one by
computing a preliminary displacement field of the particles in
the whole image.
Then, by using this preliminary displacement field, the method
makes use of a translation, a rotation and a deformation of the
second interrogation window (displaced window).
window)
Finally, the computed displacement can be better appreciated by
means of an iterative procedure.
In addition, while iterating, the algorithm allows refinement of
the size of the interrogation areas.
E.g. in the present experiments, the beginning area has a linear
dimension of 64pixels and the final one of 16pixels. Therefore,
the number of the velocity vectors is 80 x 64 for each image.
image

PIV INTERROGATION

FT

I1I2

FT -1

t+t
t

I1

FT

I1I2*

I2

Iteration

FT -1

R lt
Results

STEREOPIV EXPERIMENTAL SET-UP

Double head laser

(two laser sheets)

Two cameras
(St
(Stereoscopic
i view)
i )

z
t

V = ui + vj + wk = s / (t - t)

x
y

ANGULAR DISPLACEMENT METHOD

SCHEIMPFLUG CONDITION
(f# = 2.8 , = 45 , = 5)

Scheimpflug condition
y