Advancements in VIC-TSA with Radial Basis Functions

Abstract

Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) is an effective and non-intrusive flow measurement technique that is able to provide quantitative information of the full velocity field at a certain instant in time, by tracking each particle individually with high-speed cameras. This permits to have a very high precision in measuring the flow evolutions. The abundant time information can then be leveraged by reconstruction algorithms not only to bring the information into a Cartesian format, but also to increase the space resolution of the original measurements. This thesis aims to explore the enhancement of the Navier-Stokes based reconstruction method called VIC-TSA (Vortex-in-Cell with Time-Segment-Assimilation) through the implementation of Radial Basis Functions (RBF). Moreover, it investigates whether the incorporation of RBFs can enable VIC TSA to match or exceed the accuracy of the VIC+ method. The improvements are evaluated numerically with a synthetic flow field (Taylor-Green sine wave vortex lattice) and experimentally (flow over a bluff body) with a real Lagrangian Particle Tracking (LPT) experiment in the TU Delft W-Tunnel.