Single-view volumetric PIV via high-resolution scanning, isotropic voxel restructuring and 3D least-squares matching (3D-LSM)

Scanning PIV as introduced by Brucker (1995 Exp. Fluids 19 255-63, 1996a Appl. Sci. Res. 56 157-79) has been successfully applied in the last 20 years to different flow problems where the frame rate was sufficient to ensure a 'frozen' field condition. The limited number of parallel planes however leads typically to an under-sampling in the scan direction in depth; therefore, the spatial resolution in depth is typically considerably lower than the spatial resolution in the plane of the laser sheet (depth resolution = scan shift Delta z >> pixel unit in object space). In addition, a partial volume averaging effect due to the thickness of the light sheet must be taken into account. Herein, the method is further developed using a high-resolution scanning in combination with a Gaussian regression technique to achieve an isotropic representation of the tracer particles in a voxel-based volume reconstruction with cuboidal voxels. This eliminates the partial volume averaging effect due to light sheet thickness and leads to comparable spatial resolution of the particle field reconstructions in x-, y-and z-axes. In addition, advantage of voxel-based processing with estimations of translation, rotation and shear/strain is taken by using a 3D least-squares matching method, well suited for reconstruction of grey-level pattern fields. The method is discussed in this paper and used to investigate the ring vortex instability at Re = 2500 within a measurement volume of roughly 75 x 75 x 50 mm(3) with a spatial resolution of 100 mu m/voxel (750 x 750 x 500 voxel elements). The volume has been scanned with a number of 100 light sheets and scan rates of 10 kHz. The results show the growth of the Tsai-Widnall azimuthal instabilities accompanied with a precession of the axis of the vortex ring. Prior to breakdown, secondary instabilities evolve along the core with streamwise oriented striations. The front stagnation point's streamwise distance to the core starts to decrease while the rear stagnation point distance remains constant which indicates that the front part of the ring is at first losing its mass during breakdown.