An assessment of vortex detection criteria for 2C-2D PIV data

The aim of the article is to propose a robust and reliable engineering method for identifying and characterizing vortical structures within a flow field measured with a classic twocomponent PIV measurement system. Some of the most popular vortex-detection criteria are briefly presented for comparison purposes. Many of these fail if spurious vectors are present within the flow field due to poor PIV image quality. The proposed method was tested both on synthetic images of ideal vortices, having different spatial resolutions and different noise levels in order to perform a parametric assessment, and on real PIV images of a four-bladed rotor wake.