REAL-TIME PARTICLE IMAGE VELOCIMETRY

IRIARTE, JOSE; DELLAVALE, DAMIAN; SONNAILLON, MAXIMILIANO; BONETTO, FABIAN

Conferencia; SPL 2009; 2009

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) allows measuring distributed flow velocity fields. It is well established as an experimental tool in modern fluid dynamics research, being applied to liquid, gases and multiphase flows. Images of tracer particles are processed by means of a statistical strategy, which makes its real-time implementation difficult to achieve. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of an embedded architecture for real-time PIV based on FPGA technology. The proposed scheme has allowed us to exploit the lowlevel parallelization in both, the direct cross-correlation computation and interrogation windows handling. We propose a bus architecture to manage multiple interfaces among the processing modules and external devices. By using this scheme, we achieved design flexibility and improved processing speed. Major benefits of the speed improvement are enhanced experimental capabilities like feedback control, on-line flow regimen visualization, and a significant speed up in off-line processing. We show experimental results of a physical field of velocities calculated in real-time.