 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(April 2009) |
Flow visualization or flow visualisation in fluid dynamics is used to make the flow patterns visible, in order to get qualitative or quantitative information on them.
Flow visualization is the art of making flow patterns visible. Most fluids (air, water, etc.) are transparent, thus their flow patterns are invisible to the naked eye without methods to make them this visible.
Historically, such methods included experimental methods. With the development of computer models and CFD simulating flow processes (e.g. the distribution of air-conditioned air in a new car), purely computational methods have been developed.
In experimental fluid dynamics, flows are visualized by three methods:
In scientific visualization flows are visualized with two main methods:
In computational fluid dynamics the numerical solution of the governing equations can yield all the fluid properties in space and time. This overwhelming amount of information must be displayed in a meaningful form. Thus flow visualization is equally important in computational as in experimental fluid dynamics.
Schlieren photography is a process for photographing fluid flow. Invented by the German physicist August Toepler in 1864 to study supersonic motion, it is widely used in aeronautical engineering to photograph the flow of air around objects.
In fluid dynamics, a Mach wave is a pressure wave traveling with the speed of sound caused by a slight change of pressure added to a compressible flow. These weak waves can combine in supersonic flow to become a shock wave if sufficient Mach waves are present at any location. Such a shock wave is called a Mach stem or Mach front. Thus, it is possible to have shockless compression or expansion in a supersonic flow by having the production of Mach waves sufficiently spaced. A Mach wave is the weak limit of an oblique shock wave where time averages of flow quantities don't change. If the size of the object moving at the speed of sound is near 0, then this domain of influence of the wave is called a Mach cone.
Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is an optical method of flow visualization used in education and research. It is used to obtain instantaneous velocity measurements and related properties in fluids. The fluid is seeded with tracer particles which, for sufficiently small particles, are assumed to faithfully follow the flow dynamics. The fluid with entrained particles is illuminated so that particles are visible. The motion of the seeding particles is used to calculate speed and direction of the flow being studied.
Laser Doppler velocimetry, also known as laser Doppler anemometry, is the technique of using the Doppler shift in a laser beam to measure the velocity in transparent or semi-transparent fluid flows or the linear or vibratory motion of opaque, reflecting surfaces. The measurement with laser Doppler anemometry is absolute and linear with velocity and requires no pre-calibration.
Velocimetry is the measurement of the velocity of fluids. This is a task often taken for granted, and involves far more complex processes than one might expect. It is often used to solve fluid dynamics problems, study fluid networks, in industrial and process control applications, as well as in the creation of new kinds of fluid flow sensors. Methods of velocimetry include particle image velocimetry and particle tracking velocimetry, Molecular tagging velocimetry, laser-based interferometry, ultrasonic Doppler methods, Doppler sensors, and new signal processing methodologies.
Fluid mechanics is the branch of physics concerned with the mechanics of fluids and the forces on them. It has applications in a wide range of disciplines, including mechanical, aerospace, civil, chemical, and biomedical engineering, as well as geophysics, oceanography, meteorology, astrophysics, and biology.
The Stokes number (Stk), named after George Gabriel Stokes, is a dimensionless number characterising the behavior of particles suspended in a fluid flow. The Stokes number is defined as the ratio of the characteristic time of a particle to a characteristic time of the flow or of an obstacle, or
Schlieren are optical inhomogeneities in transparent media that are not necessarily visible to the human eye. Schlieren physics developed out of the need to produce high-quality lenses devoid of such inhomogeneities. These inhomogeneities are localized differences in optical path length that cause deviations of light rays, especially by refraction. This light deviation can produce localized brightening, darkening, or even color changes in an image, depending on the directions the rays deviate.
Molecular tagging velocimetry (MTV) is a specific form of flow velocimetry, a technique for determining the velocity of currents in fluids such as air and water. In its simplest form, a single "write" laser beam is shot once through the sample space. Along its path an optically induced chemical process is initiated, resulting in the creation of a new chemical species or in changing the internal energy state of an existing one, so that the molecules struck by the laser beam can be distinguished from the rest of the fluid. Such molecules are said to be "tagged".
Shadowgraph is an optical method that reveals non-uniformities in transparent media like air, water, or glass. It is related to, but simpler than, the schlieren and schlieren photography methods that perform a similar function. Shadowgraph is a type of flow visualisation.
Particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) is a velocimetry method i.e. a technique to measure velocities and trajectories of moving objects. In fluid mechanics research these objects are neutrally buoyant particles that are suspended in fluid flow. As the name suggests, individual particles are tracked, so this technique is a Lagrangian approach, in contrast to particle image velocimetry (PIV), which is an Eulerian method that measures the velocity of the fluid as it passes the observation point, that is fixed in space. There are two experimental PTV methods:
Microparticles are particles between 0.1 and 100 μm in size. Commercially available microparticles are available in a wide variety of materials, including ceramics, glass, polymers, and metals. Microparticles encountered in daily life include pollen, sand, dust, flour, and powdered sugar.
Seeding a material is a concept used in fluid dynamics to describe the act of introducing specific particulates or other foreign substances into a stream of fluid being evaluated. An altered fluid will be described as having a seeded flow.
Planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) is an optical diagnostic technique widely used for flow visualization and quantitative measurements. PLIF has been shown to be used for velocity, concentration, temperature and pressure measurements.
Synthetic schlieren is a process that is used to visualize the flow of a fluid of variable refractive index. Named after the schlieren method of visualization, it consists of a digital camera or video camera pointing at the flow in question, with an illuminated target pattern behind. The method was first proposed in 1999.
Matched Index of Refraction is a facility located at the Idaho National Laboratory built in the 1990s. The purpose of the fluid dynamics experiments in the MIR flow system at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is to develop benchmark databases for the assessment of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solutions of the momentum equations, scalar mixing, and turbulence models for the flow ratios between coolant channels and bypass gaps in the interstitial regions of typical prismatic standard fuel element or upper reflector block geometries of typical Very High Temperature Reactors (VHTR) in the limiting case of negligible buoyancy and constant fluid properties.
In scientific visualization, texture advection is a family of methods to densely visualize vector fields or flows. Scientists can use the created images and animations to better understand these flows and reason about them. In comparison to techniques that visualise streamlines, streaklines, or timelines, methods of this family don't need any seed points and can produce a whole image at every step.
In experimental fluid mechanics, Lagrangian Particle Tracking refers to the process of determining trajectories of small neutrally buoyant particles that are freely suspended within a turbulent flow field. These are usually obtained by 3-D Particle Tracking Velocimetry. A collection of such particle trajectories can be used for analyzing the Lagrangian dynamics of the fluid motion, for performing Lagrangian statistics of various flow quantities etc.
Magnetic resonance velocimetry (MRV) is an experimental method to obtain velocity fields in fluid mechanics. MRV is based on the phenomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance and adapts a medical magnetic resonance imaging system for the analysis of technical flows. The velocities are usually obtained by phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging techniques. This means velocities are calculated from phase differences in the image data that has been produced using special gradient techniques. MRV can be applied using common medical MRI scanners. The term magnetic resonance velocimetry became current due to the increasing use of MR technology for the measurement of technical flows in engineering.
Joseph Katz is an Israel-born American fluid dynamicist, known for his work on experimental fluid mechanics, cavitation phenomena and multiphase flow, turbulence, turbomachinery flows and oceanography flows, flow-induced vibrations and noise, and development of optical flow diagnostics techniques, including Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Holographic Particle Image Velocimetry (HPIV). As of 2005, he is the William F. Ward Sr. Distinguished Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.
