On the uncertainty of digital PIV and PTV near walls

The reliable measurement of mean flow properties near walls and interfaces between different fluids or fluid and gas phases is a very important task, as well as a challenging problem, in many fields of science and technology. Due to the decreasing concentration of tracer particles and the strong flow gradients, these velocity measurements are usually biased. To investigate the reason and the effect of the bias errors systematically, a detailed theoretical analysis was performed using window-correlation, singe-pixel ensemble-correlation and particle tracking evaluation methods. The different findings were validated experimentally for microscopic, long-range microscopic and large field imaging conditions. It is shown that for constant flow gradients and homogeneous particle image density, the bias errors are usually averaged out. This legitimates the use of these techniques far away from walls or interfaces. However, for inhomogeneous seeding and/or nonconstant flow gradients, only PTV image analysis techniques give reliable results. This implies that for wall distances below half an interrogation window dimension, the singe-pixel ensemble-correlation or PTV evaluation should always be applied. For distances smaller than the particle image diameter, only PTV yields reliable results.