Quantification of dispersed phase concentration using light sheet imaging methods

With the prevalence of particle image velocimetry (PIV) as a quantitative tool for fluid mechanics diagnostics, its application for analyzing complicated multiphase flows has been steadily increasing over the last several decades. While the primary issue in using PIV for multiphase flows is in separating the information of the phases for independent analysis with a minimum of spurious “cross-talk,” an equally crucial but often overlooked point is in the accurate quantitative measurement of the dispersed phase concentration. Accurate concentration measurement is important due to the fact that the dispersed phase is often heterogeneously distributed in both space and time, either due to a non-uniformity of the source of particulates (such as a spray nozzle or sediment boundary) or due to inertial migration of the particles even from originally homogeneous spatial distributions. In the current work, we examine the effects of light sheet profile distortion and attenuation by tracer seeding particles, as well as reflected light from local wall boundaries on the effective light sheet thickness. The effective thickness is critical for concentration measurements, as it dictates the dispersed phase detection volume. A direct calibration method is demonstrated to measure the effective light sheet thickness in a water/glass bead system, which shows that systematic bias errors on the order of 30% can result if the reflective bed condition is not accounted for, and the errors can be as high as 50% or more if a single-point measure of the sheet width is used.