PIV data: Vortex Detection and Characterization

The aim of the article is to propose a simple engineering method for identifying and characterizing vortical structures within a flow field measured with a classic two-component PIV measurement system. Some of the most popular vortex-detection systems are briefly presented. Of these, many fail if spurious vectors are present within the flow field due to poor PIV image quality. The investigated method is robust and reliable. The method is tested on synthetic images of ideal vortices and on real PIV images of a four-bladed rotor wake. The synthetic images have different spatial resolution and different noise level in order to perform a parametric assessment. Other vortex-identification schemes are applied for comparison.