Interfacial PIV to resolve flows in the vicinity of curved surfaces

PIV measurements near a wall are generally difficult due to low seeding density, low velocity, high velocity gradient, and strong reflections. Such problems are often compounded by curved boundaries, which are commonly found in many industrial and medical applications. To systematically solve these problems, this paper presents two novel techniques for near-wall measurement, together named Interfacial PIV, which extracts both wall-shear gradient and near-wall tangential velocity profiles at one-pixel resolution. To deal with curved walls, image strips at a curved wall are stretched into rectangles by means of conformal transformation. To extract the maximal spatial information on the near-wall tangential velocity field, a novel 1D correlation function is performed on each horizontal pixel line of the transformed image template to form a “correlation stack”. This 1D correlation function requires that the wall-normal displacement component of the particles be smaller than the particle image diameter in order to produce a correlation signal. Within the image regions satisfying this condition, the correlation function yields peaks that form a tangential velocity profile. To determine this profile robustly, we propose to integrate gradients of tangential velocity outward from the wall, wherein the gradient at each wall-normal position is measured by fitting a straight line to the correlation peaks. The capability of Interfacial PIV was validated against Particle Image Distortion using synthetic image pairs generated from a DNS velocity field over a sinusoidal bed. Different velocity measurement schemes performed on the same correlation stacks were also demonstrated. The results suggest that Interfacial PIV using line fitting and gradient integration provides the best accuracy of all cases in the measurements of velocity gradient and velocity profile near wall surfaces.