Design and construction of a Miniature PIV (MPIV) system

For two decades, there has been an active research to enhance the performan ces of Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) systems. However, the resulting sys tems are somewhat very costly, cumbersome and delicate. In this paper, we a ddress the design and some first experimental results of a PIV system belon ging to the opposite paradigm. The Miniature PIV or MPIV system features re latively modest performances, but is considerably smaller (our MPIV could h old in dia. 40 mm x 120 mm), cheaper (our MPIV total cost is less than $ 50 0) and easy to handle, Potential applications include industrial velocity s ensors, The proposed MPIV system uses a one-chip-only CMOS camera with digi tal output. Only two other chips are needed, one for a buffer memory and on e for an interfacing logic that controls the system. Images are transferred to a personal computer (PC or laptop) via its standard parallel port. No e xtra hardware is required (in particular, no frame grabber board is needed) . In our first MPIV prototype presented in this paper, the strobe lighting is generated by a cheap 5 mW laser pointer diode. Experimental results are presented and discussed.