Instantaneous pressure and material acceleration measurements using a four-exposure PIV system

This paper describes a non-intrusive technique for measuring the instantaneous spatial pressure distribution over a sample area in a flow field. A four-exposure PIV system is used for measuring the distribution of material acceleration by comparing the velocity of the same group of particles at different times and then integrating it to obtain the pressure distribution. Exposing both cameras to the same particle field at the same time and cross-correlating the images enables precision matching of the two fields of view. Application of local image deformation correction to velocity vectors measured by the two cameras reduces the error due to relative misalignment and image distortion to about 0.01 pixels in synthetic images. An omni-directional virtual boundary integration scheme is introduced to integrate the acceleration while minimizing the effect of the local random errors in acceleration. Further improvements are achieved by iterations to correct the pressure along the boundary. Typically 3–5 iterations are sufficient for reducing the incremental mean pressure change in each iteration to less than 0.1% of the dynamic pressure. Validation tests of the principles of the technique using synthetic images of rotating and stagnation point flows show that the standard deviation of the measured pressure from the exact value is about 1.0%. This system is used to measure the instantaneous pressure and acceleration distributions of a 2D cavity turbulent flow field and sample results are presented.