Improvement of Acoustic Doppler Velocimetry in bubbly flow measurements as applied to river characterization for kinetic turbines

Acoustic Doppler Velocimetry (ADV) can measure flow velocities in three directions in experimental facilities and field applications. Based on the Doppler shift effect, ADV can accurately resolve the quasi-instantaneous flow field at frequencies of up to approximately 200 Hz. However, this technique is sensitive to operating conditions that can lead to contaminated signals containing large amplitude spikes, a disadvantage of ADV. Aliasing of the Doppler signal creates these spikes. Such a situation occurs when large particles intersect the sampling volume or acoustic waves. For example during the characterization of river velocities, sediments floating near the riverbed cause aliasing from particles, and more importantly, surface entrained air bubbles contaminate the ADV signal. Spikes due to air bubbles not only increase the standard deviation of the velocity, but also corrupt the autocorrelation and power spectra. As some of these spikes appear like velocity fluctuations, developing accurate despiking procedures is an important requirement during post-processing of ADV velocity measurements in bubbly flow applications. A new hybrid method is introduced which has advantages over conventional despiking methods such as the acceleration thresholding method and the phase-space thresholding method when using ADV in bubbly flow. ADV river velocity measurements near kinetic turbines demonstrate the proposed method. This method is applicable to other bubbly flow applications to characterize the liquid phase using ADV.     

Analysis of regular and irregular acoustic streaming patterns in a rectangular enclosure

This study reports an experimental investigation of the non-linear phenomena of regular (classical) and irregular streaming patterns generated in an air-filled rigid-walled square channel subjected to the acoustic standing waves of different frequencies and intensities. The interaction of acoustic waves and thermoviscous fluids is responsible for these phenomena. The resonator’s walls are maintained at isothermal condition. Synchronized particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique has been used to measure the streaming velocity fields. The experimental results show that at a given excitation frequency, regular streaming flow patterns are observed up to a certain value of the excitation amplitude. As the amplitude increases beyond this limit, the regular streaming is distorted to an irregular flow structure. The regular and irregular streaming are classified in terms of streaming Reynolds number . It is found that for Re_s2<50, classical streaming flow patterns are established and then deform to irregular and complex shapes as Re_s2 exceeds 50.