Publications Details

Practical challenges in the calculation of turbulent viscosity from piv data

Beresh, Steven J.; Miller, Nathan M.; Smith, Barton L.

Turbulent viscosities have been calculated from stereoscopic particle image velocimetry (PIV) data for a supersonic jet exhausting into a transonic crossflow. Image interrogation must be optimized to produce useful turbulent viscosity fields. High-accuracy image reconstruction should be used for the final iteration, whereas efficient algorithms produce spatial artifacts in derivative fields. Mean strain rates should be calculated from large windows (128 pixel) with 75% overlap. Turbulent stresses are optimally computed using multiple (more than two) iterations of image interrogation and 75% overlap, both of which increase the signal bandwidth. However, the improvement is modest and may not justify the considerable increase in computational expense. The turbulent viscosity may be expressed in tensor notation to include all three axes of velocity data. In this formulation, a least-squares fit to the multiple equations comprising the tensor generated a scalar turbulent viscosity that eliminated many of the artifacts and noise present in the single-component formulation. The resulting experimental turbulent viscosity fields will be used to develop data-driven turbulence models that can improve the fidelity of predictive computations.