Research Information System
EXPERIMENTS IN FLUIDS, vol.55, no.1, 2014 (SCI-Expanded)
The objective of the method described in this work is to provide an improved reconstruction of an original flow field from experimental velocity data obtained with particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique, by incorporating the local accuracy of the PIV data. The postprocessing method we propose is Kriging regression using a local error estimate (Kriging LE). In Kriging LE, each velocity vector must be accompanied by an estimated measurement uncertainty. The performance of Kriging LE is first tested on synthetically generated PIV images of a two-dimensional flow of four counter-rotating vortices with various seeding and illumination conditions. Kriging LE is found to increase the accuracy of interpolation to a finer grid dramatically at severe reflection and low seeding conditions. We subsequently apply Kriging LE for spatial regression of stereo-PIV data to reconstruct the three-dimensional wake of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle. By qualitatively comparing the large-scale vortical structures, we show that Kriging LE performs better than cubic spline interpolation. By quantitatively comparing the interpolated vorticity to unused measurement data at intermediate planes, we show that Kriging LE outperforms conventional Kriging as well as cubic spline interpolation.