Super-large-scale flow visualization using natural snowfall for the study of utility-scale wind turbine flows

With the rapid growth of wind turbine installation in recent decades, fundamental physical understanding of the flow around wind turbines and farms is becoming increasingly critical for further efficiency increases. However, the effort to develop this understanding is hindered by the significant challenges involved in modelling such a complex dynamic system with a wide range of relevant scales (blade boundary layer thickness at ∼ 1 mm to atmospheric scales at ∼ 1 km). Additionally, conventional methods used to measure air flow around wind turbines in the field (e.g., lidar) are limited by low spatio-temporal resolutions.

Intensity-based and a lifetime-based PSP imaging method with enhanced sensitivity

A pressure-/temperature-sensitive paint (PSP/TSP) has been developed and used as a measurement tool for the two-dimensional distribution of pressure and temperature on aerodynamic surfaces. In recent years, although the concern with measuring a pressure difference of several Pa, such as countermeasures against the noise of small fans, has been growing, the resolution of current PSP measurements is limited to several 10 Pa, even with carefully conducted measurements. For highly accurate measurements, researches on the advanced coating films in PSP/TSP have eagerly been conducted to date. However, measurement resolution and accuracy deteriorate when quantum efficiency or lifetime decrease under high pressure or high temperature conditions.

Mounting and support for pseudo biaxial Scheimpflug focusing for unity-magnification, high-speed particle velocimetry

A camera mount that can support both heavy cameras and heavy optics allowing a total of seven degrees of freedom shared between them has been designed. This allows for Scheimpflug focusing along one or two axes. A paper proposing a solution to two- axes Scheimpflug focusing has been examined and a new nomer is proposed for two-axes Scheimpflug focusing. The newly designed mounts allow for a broader range of solutions for combinations of positioning and alignment than traditional Scheimpflug mounts.

On the determination of 3D position and orientation of spheroidal particles using defocusing and deep learning

Tracking the 3D position of tracer particles or small objects like cells or unicellular organisms in miniaturized lab-on-a-chip or biomedical devices is complicated since it is often not possible in these setups to use multi-camera approaches. Most successful single-camera approaches for these applications are based on holography or defocusing. Holographic methods have been used to track complex objects such has bacteria (Bianchi et al. (2019)) and even to estimate their orientation (Wang et al. (2016)). However, these methods require a complex and expensive experimental setup which is not always available in research laboratories. On the other hand, defocusing methods work with conventional microscopic optics, are easy to implement, and have shown excellent results in 3D PTV experiments (Qiu et al. (2019)). One main drawback is that they normally work only with spherical and mono-dispersed tracer particles. A defocusing method that has potential to measure non-spherical particles is the General Defocusing Particle Tracking (Barnkob and Rossi (2020)) which is based on pattern recognition and can be conceptually extended to more complex tasks by extending the reference library of particle images, including not only spherical particles at different depth positions, but also non-spherical particles at different orientations. However, whether this approach could work in practice is still unknown. First, is the information contained in simple defocused images sufficient to reconstruct depth and orientation of non-spherical particles, and eventually under which circumstances? Second, how to practically collect the labelled reference images?

Aerodynamics of a cycling wheel in crosswind by coaxial volumetric velocimetry

The aerodynamic characteristics of a modern road cycling wheel in crosswind are studied through force measurements and 3D velocimetry in TU Delft’s Open Jet Facility. The performance of the 62 mm deep rim is evaluated for two tire profiles, and yaw angles up to 20◦ . All measurements are executed at 12.5 m/s (45 km/h) freestream- and wheel-rotational velocity. The wheel’s rim-tire section in crosswind is found to behave similar to an airfoil at incidence, ultimately resulting in a reduction of the wheel’s aerodynamic resistance with increasing yaw angle magnitude. This trend, also referred to as the sail-effect, is limited by the stall angle of the tire-rim profile. The stall angle is found to be dependent on the tire surface texture and varies between 14◦ and 20◦.

Investigation on computed pressures from PIV, a study of how boundary definitions affect pressure accuracy along objects on the example of a cylinder flow.

This work discusses an approach to compute pressure fields from planar PIV measurement using standard CFD tools. In particular, we propose a combination of interpolation and mesh adaptation to import the PIV measurements on a grid that is morphed around objects, and is fine enough to solve the Poisson equation accurately. The whole process of meshing, interpolation and pressure computation is carried out using the popular open-source solver OpenFoam®. The method is tested and validated on a classic benchmark test case, namely, the unsteady flow past a cylinder. A 3D multiphase flow simulation is used to generate the reference data and analyze the impact of both, the PIV interrogation and the interpolation on the morphed grid. The simulation uses an Euler-Lagrangian one-way coupling approach to simulate the flow field and the dynamics of seeding particles. The analysis compares the pressure field from the 3D CFD simulation with the solution of a 2D Poisson equation based on the 2D velocity field obtained by either down-sampling the CFD data or by PIV interrogation of synthetic images built from the CFD data. Finally, we challenge the proposed method with the pressure reconstruction in a TR-PIV experiment in similar conditions.

Three-dimensional temperature and velocity measurements in fluids using thermographic phosphor tracer particles

Many flows of technical and scientific interest are intrinsically three-dimensional. Extracting slices using planar measurement techniques allows only a limited view into the flow physics and can introduce ambiguities while investigating the extent of 3D regions. Nowadays, thanks to tremendous progress in the field of volumetric velocimetry, full 3D-3C velocity information can be gathered using tomographic PIV or PTV hence eliminating many of these ambiguities (Discetti and Coletti, 2018; Westerweel et al., 2013). However, for scalar quantities like temperature, 3D measurements remain challenging. Previous approaches for coupled 3D thermometry and velocimetry combined astigmatism PTV with encapsulated europium chelates particles (Massing et al., 2018) or tomographic PIV with thermochromic liquid crystals particles (Schiepel et al., 2021). Here we present a new technique based on solid thermographic phosphor tracer particles, which have been extensively used for planar fluid temperature and velocity measurements (Abram et al., 2018) and are applicable in a wide range of temperatures. The particles are seeded into a gas flow where their 3D positions are retrieved by triangulation from multiple views and their temperatures are derived from two-colour luminescence ratio imaging. In the following, the experimental setup and key processing steps are described before a demonstration of the concept in a turbulent heated jet is shown.

Volumetric Flow Rate Measurement using Surface Imaging Techniques

The purpose of our research is to validate an experimental method developed by Johnson and Cowen (2016) aimed at measuring volumetric discharge in an open channel using Surface particle image velocimetry (SPIV) combined with turbulent boundary layer analysis to infer the bathymetry and calculate volumetric flow rate, ultimately extending this work to natural systems (Hendrickson, 2020).

Fluorescent PIV using Atomized Liquid Particles

It is shown that aerosolized fluorescent particles generated using a Venturi-type atomizer, from a solution of fluorescent Kiton Red 620 dye in a water/glycol fluid, provide effective flow seeding for fluorescent PIV. The atomized liquid particles were found to be of acceptable size for PIV purposes, with 92% of detected particles by number concentration measuring < 1 μm in diameter. A PIV application was conducted in a wind tunnel (freestream velocity U∞ = 27 m/s), using the particles for measurement of the boundary layer flow approaching a forward-facing step (approach boundary layer momentum thickness Reynolds number of Reθ = 5930), to identify potential benefits in near-wall regions normally affected by unwanted laser reflections from tunnel surfaces. Particles were generated from solutions with dye molar concentrations of 2.5 × 10−3 and 1.0 × 10−2 mol/L, and PIV images were obtained for both elastic Mie scattering and filtered, Stokes-shifted fluorescent light. Raw images indicate that the fluorescence yield of the 1.0 × 10−2 mol/L solution provides PIV images with high contrast, even in the near-surface regions where Mie scattering images are highly affected by surface reflections. Boundary layer profiles are processed in the adverse pressure gradient region leading up to the forward-facing step, where the fluorescent PIV performed comparably to the most optimized Mie scattering PIV; both obtained data as near to the wall as 30 μm, or 2 viscous wall units in our flow of interest. These results indicate that the new seeding method holds excellent promise for near-surface measurement applications with more complicated three-dimensional geometries, where it is impossible to arrange PIV cameras to reject surface-scattered light.

Cross-plane stereo-PIV measurements in a refractive-index-matched environment of flow associated with barchan dunes immersed in a turbulent boundary layer

Barchan dunes are crescent-shaped bedforms that form in aeolian (i.e., wind-driven) environments (including both Earth and other planets, such as Mars) as well as subaqueous environments. Under the forcing of the aloft turbulent boundary layer, they migrate downstream at a rate inversely proportional to their size, which results in complex interactions between neighboring dunes of disparate scales. In particular, it has been observed that dunes will interact at a distance, causing changes in morphology without contacting each other, which is thought to be driven by the way dunes modify the local flow field Bristow et al. (2018); Assis and Franklin (2020). In this study, the coherent structures formed in the wakes of barchan dunes are investigated using measurements of the flow over fixed-bed (i.e., solid) barchan models, both in the wake of an isolated barchan and the interdune region between interacting barchans (Fig. 1(a)). Furthermore, the interactions between the flow structures shed by the dunes and the structures in the incoming boundary layer are analyzed.