Velocity measurements on highly turbulent free surface flow using ADV

The 3D instantaneous velocity recorded with an acoustic Doppler velocimeter (ADV) in a highly turbulent free surface flow is analysed using several filters in order to eliminate the corrupted data from the sample. The filters used include the minimum/maximum threshold, the acceleration threshold, and the phase-space threshold. Following some ideas of the phase-space filter, a new method based on the 3D velocity cross-correlation is proposed and tested. A way of computing the constants of the acceleration threshold method is proposed, so no parameters need to be fixed by the user, which makes the filtering process simpler, more objective and more efficient. All the samples analysed are highly turbulent. Nevertheless, the turbulence intensity and the air entrainment vary widely in the flow under study, which produces data records of different quality depending on the measurement point. The performance of the filtering methods when applied to samples of different quality, and the effects of the filtering process in the mean velocity, turbulent kinetic energy and frequency spectra are discussed.