Feasibility study of three-dimensional PIV by correlating images of particles witthin parallel light sheets

Abstract: One approach to obtain information about the out-of-plane velocity component from PIV recordings is to analyze the height of the peak in the correlation plane. This value depends on the portion of paired particle 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 another light sheet plane parallel to the first one were also captured for peak height normalization. Our experimental results show the feasibility of an out-of-plane velocity estimation by analyzing images of particles within parallel light sheets by spatial cross-correlation.