Empirical mode decomposition and Hilbert transforms for analysis of oil-film interferograms

Oil-film interferometry is rapidly becoming the preferred method for direct measurement of wall shear stress in studies of wall-bounded turbulent flows. Although being widely accepted as the most accurate technique, it does have inherent measurement uncertainties, one of which is associated with determining the fringe spacing. This is the focus of this paper. Conventional analysis methods involve a certain level of user input and thus some subjectivity. In this paper, we consider empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert transform as an alternative tool for analyzing oil-film interferograms. In contrast to the commonly used Fourier-based techniques, this new method is less subjective and, as it is based on the Hilbert transform, is superior for treating amplitude and frequency modulated data. This makes it particularly robust to wide differences in the quality of interferograms.