FEASIBILITY STUDY OF 3-DIMENSIONAL PIV BY CORRELATING IMAGES OF PARTICLES WITHIN PARALLEL LIGHT SHEET PLANES

One approach to obtain information about the out-of-plane velocity com ponent from PIV recordings is to analyze the height of the peak in the correlation plane. This value depends on the portion of paired partic le images, which itself depends on the out-of-plane velocity component and on other parameters. To circumvent problems with other influences (e.g. background light, amount and size of images), images from anoth er light sheet plane parallel to the first one were also captured for peak height normalization. Our experimental results show the feasibili ty of an out-of-plane velocity estimation by analyzing images of parti cles within parallel light sheets by spatial cross-correlation.