An irrotation correction on pressure gradient and orthogonal-path integration for PIV-based pressure reconstruction

Particle image velocimetry (PIV)-based pressure reconstruction has become a popular technique in experimental fluid mechanics. Noise or errors in raw velocity field would significantly affect the quality of pressure reconstruction in PIV measurement. To reduce experimental errors in pressure gradient and improve the precision of reconstructed pressure field, a minimal 2-norm criteria-based new technique called irrotation correction (IC) with orthogonal decomposition is developed. The pressure reconstruction is therefore composed of three steps: calculation of pressure gradient from time-resolved velocity fields of PIV, an irrotation correction on the pressure gradient field, and finally a simple orthogonal-path integration (OPI) for pressure. Systematic assessments of IC algorithm are performed on synthetic solid-body rotation flow, direct numerical simulations of a channel flow and an isotropic turbulent flow. The results show that IC is a robust algorithm which can significantly improve the accuracy of pressure reconstruction primarily in the low wave number domain. After irrotation correction, noisy pressure gradient field ideally becomes an irrotational field on which the pressure integration is independent of integrating paths. Therefore, an OPI algorithm is proposed to perform the pressure integration in an efficient way with very few integration paths. This makes the new technique to be a doable method on three-dimensional pressure reconstruction with acceptable computational cost.