FABRICATION OF PARTICLE IMAGE VELOCIMETRY SETUP FOR EXPERIMENTATION AT LOW REYNOLDS NUMBER

Abstract

Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is a widely utilized experimental technique for fluid analysis, particularly in low Reynolds number flow. This paper describes the design fabrication process of the PIV setup and its application for studying the flow over a flat plate (with a chord of 76.33 mm) at low Reynolds numbers ranging from 2,000 to 10,000. The PIV system employs a class IIIB laser to illuminate a plane of seeding particles, a highspeed camera (Chronos 2.1), and a smartphone camera to capture the frames at frame rates of 100 fps and 16 fps, respectively. Sequential frames are cross-correlated using PIVlab, a MATLAB-based image processing application for PIV, to generate two-dimensional velocity fields. The velocity field data obtained are analyzed to identify low Reynolds number flow features, such as laminar separation bubble, reattachment point, turbulent mixing, and trailing edge vortex shedding pattern. Furthermore, the experimental results are compared to the results from numerical simulation carried over same geometry at similar Reynolds number. Finally, different sources of errors in the experimental setup, image