Digital holography particle image velocimetry for the measurement of 3Dt-3c flows

In this paper a digital in-line holographic recording and reconstruction system was set up and used in the particle image velocimetry for the 3Dt-3c (the three-component (3c), velocity vector field measurements in a three-dimensional (3D), space field with time history (t)) flow measurements that made up of the new full-flow field experimental technique—digital holographic particle image velocimetry (DHPIV). The traditional holographic film was replaced by a CCD chip that records instantaneously the interference fringes directly without the darkroom processing, and the virtual image slices in different positions were reconstructed by computation using Fresnel–Kirchhoff integral method from the digital holographic image. Also a complex field signal filter (analyzing image calculated by its intensity and phase from real and image parts in fast fourier transform (FFT)) was applied in image reconstruction to achieve the thin focus depth of image field that has a strong effect with the vertical velocity component resolution. Using the frame-straddle CCD device techniques, the 3c velocity vector was computed by 3D cross-correlation through space interrogation block matching through the reconstructed image slices with the digital complex field signal filter. Then the 3D-3c-velocity field (about 20 000 vectors), 3D-streamline and 3D-vorticiry fields, and the time evolution movies (30 field/s) for the 3Dt-3c flows were displayed by the experimental measurement using this DHPIV method and techniques.