Facilities

Water Channel Facility: Fluid Discovery Lab at Penn State Berks is equipped with a new free-surface water channel facility recently designed and constructed by Dr. Azar Eslam-Panah’s group. The channel has a 12’ x 2.5’ x 2’ glass test section with a maximum velocity of 3 ft/s. The facility has flow conditioning consisting of a 2:1 contraction ratio, honeycomb, and three screens to maintain turbulence intensity below 0.1% (Fig. 1)

Time-Resolved 2D Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV): The current 2D PIV system includes a continuous laser, a Miro 310 high speed camera with 1280 x 800 pixel resolution sensor, 20 x 20 micron pixels, 1630 frames/sec at full resolution, 5790 frames/sec at 512 x 512 pixel resolution, 12-bits digital output, 6 GB on-board memory, and equipped with F-mount flange, GigE interface, and a 50 mm f/1.8 D Nikon lens (Fig. 2A). LaVision DAVIS software (version 8.2) will be used with a multipass correlation (128 x 128 and 32 x 32, 50% overlap) to process the images into velocity vectors. (Fig. 1)

3D Tomographic Particle Image Velocimetry (Tomo PIV): The Tomo PIV facilitates the instantaneous measurement of all three velocity components (3C) in a complete three-dimensional (3D) measurement volume in fluid dynamics experiments. There are two FlowMaster licenses to enable experimentation and data processing simultaneously at different campuses. This system includes four Imager sCMOS Cameras, 2560 x 2160 pixel resolution at 50 Hz (Fig. 2B); one Nd:YAG Dual Cavity pulsed laser, 200 mJ/pulse at 532 nm and 15 Hz pulse rate; Programmable Timing Unit (PTU-X); DaVis 8 Software package for data acquisition, visualization, and processing; and the optical lenses and adaptors. All the hardware components are fully integrated and controlled by the powerful DaVis software. The laser focusing optics enables the formation of a light volume that can be as large as 300 x 300 x 60 mm or as small as 20 x 20 x 10 mm, which would easily encompass a large range of flow structures in the water channel or the boundary layer experiments using appropriate optics. The PTU-X is the heart of the PIV system which generates precise trigger pulses for the cameras, lasers, and devices controlled by DaVis and external triggers.(Fig. 1)