Limitations of estimating turbulent convection velocities from PIV

Roeland de Kat, Lian Gan, James R Dawson, Bharathram Ganapathisubramani

Published 2013-11-25Version 1

This paper deals with determination of turbulent convection velocities from particle image velocimetry (PIV). Turbulent convection velocities are of interest because they can be used to map temporal information into space. Convection velocity can be defined in several different ways. One approach is to use the phase-spectrum of two signals with a time-separation. Obtaining convection velocity per wavenumber involves determining a spatial spectrum. PIV data is limited in spatial resolution and sample length. The influence of truncation of both spatial resolution and frequency resolution is investigated, as well as the influences of spatial filtering and measurement noise. These issues are investigated by using a synthetic data set obtained by creating velocity-time data with an imposed spectrum. Results from the validation show that, when applying a Hamming window before determining the phase spectrum, there is a usable range of wavenumbers for which convection velocities can be determined. Simulation of flow evolution, movement into and out of the measurement plane, and measurement noise show that these result in a spread in convection velocities using the current approach. Despite this spread, the most probable calculated convection velocity coincides with the imposed convection velocity. Application of the phase-spectral approach to a turbulent boundary layer with $Re_\tau \approx 2700$, shows there is a range of convection velocities and that the most probable convection velocity is equal to the local mean velocity.