Development of fiberscope PIV system by controlling diode laser illumination

Because of the inherent small size of optical fiberscopes, they provide access and relative handling ease in given closed vessels, which are hardly equipped with extra windows for conventional flow visualization. The use of an optical fiberscope in conjunction with a conventional particle image velocimetry/particle tracking velocimetry (PIV/PTV) system without optimization can lead to degraded transmission of images. The present study proposes a processing technique to filter background noise contained within the coarse bundle image by subtracting the original image of the bundle as reference image. Additionally, efforts were made to increase the reliability of vector processing using particle streak images via judicious pulse interval and duration adjustments. As an applications test we measured classic jet flow using the developed system and using established conventional measurement techniques. Our tests confirmed that our fiberscope PTV system provides vector fields with sufficient accuracy.