10TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PARTICLE IMAGE VELOCIMETRY PIV13

Delft, The Netherlands, July 1-3, 2013

Vortex-in-Cell method for time-supersampling of PIV data

1

Jan Schneiders , Richard P. Dwight and Fulvio Scarano

1

Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

janschneiders@gmail.com, r.p.dwight@tudelft.nl

ABSTRACT
The present work investigates the use of a vortex-in-cell (VIC) inviscid, incompressible Navier-Stokes solver [1,2] to
increase temporal resolution of time-resolved 3D fluid-velocity data obtained from tomographic PIV experiments. The
measurement rate in such experiments is limited by available laser power, and the requirements of laser pulse energy
and quality of particle image digital recordings. The principle of time-supersampling is that by using an interpolation
based on a largely complete description of the flow-physics, high spatial-resolution can be leveraged to increase low
temporal-resolution. The numerical solver simulating the fluid is applied on a domain corresponding to the 3D
measurement volume, and time-integration is performed between each pair of consecutive measurements. Initial
conditions are taken from the first measurement field, and time-resolved boundary conditions can be approximated
either by linear interpolation or advection-model-based interpolation between the two fields. To obtain a continuous
representation of the velocity in time, a weighted-average of forward- and backward-time integration is made. To make
the backward integration problem well-posed, viscosity is neglected. This is justified given the short time-interval
between measurements. The supersampling method is applied to a turbulent wake, and a cylindrical jet, and compared
to reference high-frequency experimental data, as well as an advection-model-based supersampling approach. In both
test cases temporal resolution substantially above the Nyquist limit is achieved.

INTRODUCTION
The measurement rate for time resolved 3d tomographic PIV is at the moment insufficient for aerodynamic problems
where the flow velocity may approach 100 m/s. The present work investigates the use of a vortex-in-cell (VIC) inviscid,
incompressible Navier-Stokes solver [1,2] to increase of temporal resolution of time-resolved 3D velocity data obtained
from tomographic PIV experiments. We name this procedure time-supersampling. The objective is to achieve a
temporal resolution not available to the original measurement system. The unsteady Navier-Stokes equations are solved
using VIC, on the experimental measurement domain, starting from an initial condition given by one measurement
field. Appropriate boundary conditions must be specified, and smooth matching of the solution at the measurement
times is necessary. As a side-effect the unsteady pressure field is also computed.
The work follows a previous study [4] that investigated the use of the advection equation for the same purpose. There a
significant increase the temporal resolution of PIV time-series was demonstrated for certain classes of flows. For
example the method showed generally good accuracy in flows with strong uniform background advection, where the
turbulence was approximately frozen. Less accurate results were obtained in a jet into quiescent fluid, where the free
shear layer is dominated by strong vortices that roll-up under the effects of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. This is a
direct consequence of the advection model not including the non-linear physics. In this study the advection model is
compared against VIC. Other related work has involved filling spatial gaps in PIV data using a N-S solver [3].
The VIC method only applies to substantially divergence-free velocity fields. Therefore the study does not treat the case
of 2d N-S and planar PIV measurements, where the divergence-free condition is almost never met. Instead, the work
concentrates on 3d datasets produced from tomographic PIV, where experimental velocities are available everywhere in
the domain in which the governing equations are solved.
The paper first introduces the VIC method. Then two cases are considered: the first one is the fully developed turbulent
flow at the trailing edge of a NACA airfoil [5]; the second case is a transitional jet in water [6] with a vortex-dominated
flow field. In both cases tomo-PIV measurements well-resolved in time are available. This data is first under-sampled
by some factor and then the VIC method is applied to this reduced data-set. The removed samples act as reference
solutions for evaluating the accuracy of the reconstruction. The method is also compared to linear interpolation (no
physics) and the advection model (linear physics). In both cases the VIC method is able to accurately reconstruct the
velocity time series. Notably in the jet case, this remains true even when the sampling rate is reduced below the
shedding frequency of the vortices.

VORTEX-IN-CELL METHOD
The VIC method first appeared in Christiansen [1] in 1973. The method is based on a rewriting of the
inviscid, incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in terms of vorticity. The vorticity transport equation is:

+ = ,

(1)

where the velocity field is related to the 3d vorticity distribution by a Poisson equation:
=

(2)

Initial conditions on vorticity are computed from experimental data at time ! , time-dependent boundary
conditions are based on interpolation of experimental data.
This is proposed as a model for the fluid in the measurement domain in our experiment, and the effectiveness
of the supersampling will depend upon the quality of this model. For example we rely on an almost
incompressible (typically also isothermal) fluid. If the model is 2d then we require that - in the measurement
domain - the flow is almost 2d. This is rarely the case to sufficient accuracy in practice. One consequence is
that 2d PIV data has non-zero divergence, making it unsuitable as an initial condition for the divergence-free
field . Therefore to eliminate this source of error we proceed directly to the 3d case using tomo-PIV data.
In the applications presented later, the main error in this model is due to neglecting viscosity. This
approximation is made to preserve the time-reversibility of the governing equations, and this is necessary for
our method of matching solutions at final times. This is a negligible error under the circumstances of very
short integration times (between two consecutive measurements) and convection dominated flow, as we
expect to occur in our applications.
NUMERICAL TREATMENT
A full discussion of the VIC method is given in [2]. The basic principle is to discretize the vorticity
distribution by a limited number of point vortices,
, =

! [ ! ]
!

(3)

where ! is an estimate of the circulation in a small region Vp around the vortex particle at location xp.
! =

!!

(4)

In case of 3d PIV data produced from tomographic PIV measurements, it is convenient to initialize a vortex
particle at each grid node making use of the measured velocity field, i.e. use the uniform Cartesian grid
defined by the experimental data-set. The vorticity field is evaluated using central differences.
The distribution of point vortices is integrated in time using the following procedure:
1. Advect the vortex particles:

!
= (! , )

(5)

2. Update the particle circulation to account for vortex stretching:

!
= ! (! , )

(6)

3. Evaluate the updated vorticity field at grid nodes:

! , =

1
!

!
!

! ! ()

(7)

where h is the mesh cell width and = () with

0
1
2 ! (1 )
= 2
1
(2 5 ! + 3 !
2

>2
1 || 2
|| 1

radially symmetric interpolation function, introduced by Monaghan [7]. The function has been used
successfully for this purpose in general VIC codessee for example in [2,8,9]. Using this function,
each particle can influence 444 neighbouring particles. To allow the assignment procedure to be
vectorized, vortex particles are ordered such that they are at least five grid points apart and assign
their strength to different subsets of the mesh, as suggested in [10].
4. Calculate the velocity field on the grid using (2).
Solving the Poisson equation in the last step is done using a Fast Poisson solver based on the Fourier
transform. The time integration is performed time-marching from a given PIV snapshot towards the
subsequent one. As in previous work based on the advection equation [4], the time-marching procedure is
also performed backwards (i.e. from the subsequent snapshot to the previous one), and the forward and
backward velocity fields are averaged with a weight corresponding to the distance in time from their
respective initial conditions. This operation ensures that the time-history remains continuous also at the
measurements times, although it will no longer satisfy exactly the N-S equations. The necessity of backward
integration means the governing equations must be time-reversible, hence viscosity is not allowed.
INITIAL CONDITIONS AND BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
Initial conditions are taken by calculating the vorticity from the first measured velocity field. Time-resolved
velocity boundary conditions required for solving the Poisson equation can be imposed either with a linear
interpolation or better, making use of an advection-based interpolation as proposed in [4].
The vorticity values on the domain boundary need to be corrected for the lack of vortex particles just outside
of the boundary. This can be done using an iterative approach as suggested in [2], however, to allow for
cheaper computation an estimate of the vorticity field can be calculated from the advection-based
interpolation between the measurements and overlaid over the boundaries.

EXPERIMENTAL ASSESSMENT
The VIC method is utilized to supersample PIV time-resolved sequences and its accuracy is scrutinized
considering two test cases that are detailed in literature and where the datasets are available to the authors.
The method is compared with two other reconstruction techniques: the first one is a point-wise linear
interpolation; the second one makes use of the advection equation as described in [4].
NACA AIRFOIL TRAILING EDGE FLOW
The first case is the fully developed turbulent boundary layer leaving the trailing edge of a NACA 0012
airfoil [5]. This case has been chosen in order to verify whether the VIC method is able to reconstruct the

time-resolved velocity fields in conditions close to frozen turbulence. Here the advection-based model has
been demonstrated to yield results with good accuracy and is therefore considered as a reference technique.
Free stream velocity
Repetition rate
Measurement field
Interrogation volume (IV)
Vectors per field

14 m/s
2700 Hz
47 47 8 mm
32 32 32 voxel (1.47 1.47 1.47 mm3)
128 128 22

Table 1 Experimental parameters for the turbulent wake flow as done by Ghaemi [5]
The flow in the near wake of the airfoil features the typical pattern of fully developed boundary layers with
elongated regions at alternating low and high-speed streaks (Figure 1). Table 1 lists the relevant experimental
parameters and a full description of the flow field and experiment is presented in Ghaemi [5].

Figure 1 Tomographic experiments at the trailing edge of a NACA airfoil. Schematic layout of experiment (left) and
sample instantaneous flow field (right). Organization of the low-speed (blue/dark grey) and high speed (green/light
grey) streaks visualized by iso-surfaces of u/U = 0.1. Axes are scaled to momentum thickness of the boundary layer at
the airfoil edge (repr. from Ghaemi et al. [5]).

The assessment is performed by initially sub-sampling the available time series (open circles in Figure 2) to a
coarser set of time samples (filled circles). Subsequently, the time-supersampling techniques are applied and
the resulting velocity fields are compared to the original time series. The Sub-Sampling Factor (SSF) defines
the extent to which the data is sub-sampled.
SSF =

!"#$%&"!"'(
!"#!!"#$%&'

(1)

The relative error is considered as the Euclidean norm for all velocity components normalized by a reference
velocity. A statistical estimator is obtained by averaging in time at each grid point. In the present case of the
turbulent wake, the reference speed is chosen to be the free stream velocity of 14 m/s.
1
1
=

V!"#

!/!

!"",! !"#$,!
!!!

(1)

Figure 2 - Time history of two velocity components in the center of the measurement domain, as calculated from velocity
fields sub-sampled with SSF = 6.

Figure 3 - Contour plot of the relative error in a plane parallel to the airfoil for SSF = 4 and SSF = 8

The time history of the velocity at a point chosen in the center of the measurement domain is shown in
Figure 2 for the case of SSF = 6. In these conditions the measurements have been sub-sampled from 2700 Hz
to 450 Hz. As expected, the linear interpolation fails to reconstruct the temporal velocity fluctuations caused
by the convection of turbulent fluctuations. In contrast, both the advection and VIC method are quite
adequate in this case as they yield a velocity field reconstruction close to that of the fully sampled data
series.
The spatial distribution of the statistical error along a plane parallel to the airfoil is reported in Figure 3. It
can be seen that the error obtained by the VIC method is in the same order of magnitude as the advection
model error. Furthermore, especially for the larger SSF = 8 it can be seen that the VIC error is slightly lower.
Near the boundaries the advection and vortex methods yield essentially equivalent results, because the
advection-based interpolation has been used to set boundary conditions for the VIC method. Further away
from the boundaries, the VIC method improves upon the advection model.
In Figure 3 it can be seen that as expected for a larger SSF the relative error is larger. The effect of increasing
the time separation between subsequent measurements used in the calculation (i.e. virtually decreasing the
measurement rate) is monitored by following the average relative error, evaluated over the whole domain
and over a long sequence of 50 snapshots. Figure 4 confirms that indeed the error increases with increasing
SSF. Furthermore, the error of the linear point-wise interpolation increases rapidly and as also observed in
Figure 2, the linear-interpolation is rapidly inadequate. Already at very low SSF, the error made by the
linear-interpolation is in the order of the RMS velocity fluctuations.
Figure 4 shows a substantially better reconstruction is obtained by both the advection and vortex models. The
models perform similar, with the VIC method achieving slightly smaller errors as also seen in Figure 3.

Average Relative Error for Transitional Jet case

Average Relative Error for Turbulent Wake case

0.07

0.09
0.06

Average relative error

Average relative error

0.08
0.07
0.06
0.05
0.04
0.03

0.05

0.04

0.03

0.02

0.02

Linear Interpolation
Advection Model
Vortex Model

0.01
0

Linear Interpolation
Advection Model
Vortex Model

0.01

10

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

SSF

SSF

Figure 4 Average relative error calculated over the whole domain for both the wake and jet cases

TRANSITIONAL CIRCULAR JET

The second case is that of a transitional circular jet measured in a water tank. For this flow, less accurate results were
obtained using the advection model and therefore it is chosen as a second test case for the VIC method. The free shear
layer is dominated by strong vortices that roll-up under the effect of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and the assumption of
frozen turbulence is not valid in this region. The relevant experimental parameters are listed in Table 2 and full details
of the experiment can be found in [6]. For reference the flow is visualized in Figure 5, which shows an instantaneous
velocity vector slice in the axial plane.
Figure 6 shows the time history of the radial and axial velocity components in a point in the shear layer. As can be seen
both the linear interpolation and the advection model fail to give a correct representation of the velocity fluctuations.
This is expected, as the sampling frequency has been reduced from 1000 Hz to 25 Hz, which is below the frequency of
approximately 30 Hz at which vortex are shed. The VIC method however is able to accurately reconstruct the velocity
fluctuations.

Jet velocity
Repetition rate
Measurement field
Interrogation window (IO)
Vectors per field

0.5 m/s
1000 Hz
Cylinder 30 mm (d) 50 mm (h)
40 40 40 voxel (2 2 2 mm)
61 102 61

Table 2 Experimental parameters for the transitional jet as done by Violato and Scarano [6]

Figure 5 Instantaneous velocity and vorticity field in a transitional jet. Velocity vectors on an axial plane. Cyan isosurface for azimuthal vorticity. Red iso-surface for positive axial velocity fluctuations. Yellow/green iso-surfaces for
positive/negative streamwise vorticity (repr. from Violato and Scarano [6]).

u velocity component (radial) R/D = 0.6, Y/D = 3, Z/D = 0

v velocity component (axial) R/D = 0.6, Y/D = 3, Z/D = 0

4.5
4

axial velocity [voxels/ms]

radial velocity [voxels/ms]

3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
Reference Measurements (1000 Hz)
SubSampled Measurements (25 Hz)
Linear Interpolation
SuperSampled with Advection Model
SuperSampled with Vortex Model

2
0.5
3

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

10

20

30

40

time [ms]

50

60

70

80

time [ms]

Figure 6 Time history of the radial and axial velocity in the jet, calculated using a linear interpolation, the advection
model and the proposed vortex model from measurements sub-sampled from 1000 Hz to 25 Hz.

SSF = 24

Advection Model

SSF = 40

Vortex Model

SSF = 24

3.5

3.5

3.5

2.5

2.5

2.5

2.5

1.5

1.5

1.5

1.5

SSF = 40

Y/D

3.5

1
0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1
0

0.2

0.4

R/D

0.6

0.8

1
0

0.2

0.4

R/D
0

0.05

0.6

0.8

R/D
0.1

0.15

0.2

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

R/D
0.25

0.3

Figure 7 Contour plot of the relative error in the axial plane of the transitional jet at SSF = 24 and SSF = 40
The relative error is plotted in the axial plane in Figure 7. For the jet case the error has been normalized with the jet
velocity of 0.5 m/s. As can be seen the vortex model gives a substantial improvement over the advection model and
reduces the reconstruction error to acceptable values. This implies that using the vortex model, the experiment can be
performed with a repetition rate of 25 Hz, which is far below the repetition rate dictated by the Nyquist frequency based
on vortex shedding at 30 Hz.
Figure 3 shows also for the jet case the average relative error in the domain. One can see the dramatic decrease in
effectiveness of the advection model in situations where the frozen turbulence assumption is not valid. The vortex
method on the other hand allows for accurate reconstruction of the velocity field, even at high sub-sampling factors.

CONCLUSIONS
A Vortex-in-Cell (VIC) Navier-Stokes solver is proposed to increase the temporal resolution of time-resolved
tomographic PIV experiments. The numerical solver is applied on a domain corresponding to the 3D measurement
volume, and time-integration is performed between each pair of consecutive measurements to achieve a temporal
resolution not available to the original measurement system. The measurements serve as initial conditions for the VIC
method simulating the fluid and in this way the spatial resolution available by the measurements is projected into time.
The VIC method is compared to a linear interpolation (no physics) and an advection based approach (linear physics) to
increase the temporal resolution of measured time series in two experimental test cases. First, in the case of the
turbulent wake, where Taylors hypothesis of frozen turbulence holds to a large extent, both the advection model and
VIC method are able to accurately reconstruct the velocity fluctuations. Second, in the case of a transitional jet, where
the free shear layer is dominated by strong vortices that roll-up under the effect of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, the
advection model yields less accurate results. At high sub-sampling factors, the advection model fails to represent the
velocity fluctuations. The VIC method on the other hand is able to accurately reconstruct the velocity time series, even
when the sampling rate is reduced below the Nyquist frequency.

The study demonstrates that the sampling rate requirements for tomographic PIV can be strongly reduced when the data
is time super-sampled using the Vortex-in-Cell method. As anticipated, this can allow for larger measurement domains,
higher spatial resolution and new flow cases to be analyzed using tomographic PIV, at lower measurement rates than
dictated by principles such as the Nyquist frequency.

REFERENCES
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[3] Sciacchitano A, Dwight RP, Scarano F, Navier-Stokes simulations in gappy PIV data Exp. Fluids 53 (2012) 1421
[4] Scarano F and Moore PD, An advection-based model to increase the temporal resolution of PIV time series Exp. Fluids 52 (2012) 919
[5] Ghaemi S and Scarano F, Counter-hairpin vortices in the turbulent wake of a sharp trailing edge J. Fluid Mech. 689 (2011) 317
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(2011) 124104
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