Numerical validation of velocity gradient tensor particle tracking velocimetry for highly deformed flow fields

Particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) has recently been recognized as quite an effective engineering research tool for understanding multi-dimensional fluid flow structures. There are, however, still a number of unsettled problems in the practical use of PTV, i.e. the lack of generality of the PTV algorithm for various types of flows and the measurement uncertainty with respect to spatial resolution. The authors have developed a generalized PTV algorithm named the velocity gradient tensor (VGT) method in order to accurately track the tracer particles in a flow held with strong local deformation rates. The performance of the VGT method has already been examined for several simple flow fields, such as linear shearing and Taylor-Green vortex flows. In this paper, the applicability of the VGT method for complicated flows, which include a wide dynamic range in wavenumber, is quantitatively examined by simulation of Rankine vortex flows, Karman vortex-shedding flows around a rectangular cylinder and homogeneous turbulent flows, which are numerically solved by using the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations. The results show that the VGT technique, using only two frames to estimate velocity, performs better than does the four-frame PTV technique and has a remarkably higher tracking performance than those of typical conventional PTV algorithms.