Accuracy and time performance of different schemes of the local field correction PIV technique

Local field correction particle image velocimetry (LFC-PIV) has become an established alternative among high-resolution PIV techniques. Previous works by the authors introduced its implementation by means of simple algorithms. In these works the initial limitation of the method, which was related to the mean distance between particles, was removed. Comparison with other contemporary high-resolution techniques indicates that it offers advantages in robustness and accuracy. The trade-off for this better performance is a heavier computing load. Until now, the computing time that this load requires has not been characterized in detail, since this computing time could be substantially reduced by accepting a reduction in accuracy. This paper focuses on the characterization of the trade-off between time and accuracy, thus offering a new perspective to PIV. In this field, LFC-PIV offers a wide range of possibilities that are described in the paper. Several alternative schemes for LFC-PIV are tested, together with an analysis of the influence of the number of iterations. Performance figures for both accuracy and expended time are given. Metrological evaluation is carried out over synthetic images. A test of coherence between these results and the performance on real images is also presented. The paper shows that even for a limited number of iterations this technique offers advantages.