Application of Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) for Measuring Water Velocity in Laboratory Sedimentation Tank

Abstract

Over the past three decades, Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), fundamentally based on pattern matching principles, has seen a rapid growth in its usage as a flow measurement technique. PIV is a ‘digital’ tracking process to measure the time taken for water to move from one point to the other. The particle displacements can be ascertained by measuring the movement of the fluid of interest from the images captured by a camera.  In this study, PIV is employed to measure surface flow velocity. The flow velocity was obtained by analyzing the series of captured images using MatPIV codes. The experiment was carried out at Swinburne Sarawak Fluid Lab. Digital SLR camera model used is Nikon D40X which is capable of taking 5 frames per second. Various tracer particles were used for the experiments include food dye, beads and ping pong balls. The experiments were conducted in a SOLTEQ Sedimentation Tank. Through the implementation of a standardized correction factor, the corrected PIV velocity has an error margin less than 5% which is deemed to be fairly accurate. The PIV velocity (V_piv) results showed to be in good agreement with the actual velocity (V_actual).