Shake-The-Box: 3D Lagrangian particle tracking for turbulence characterization at high particle image densities

Abstract

Shake-The-Box (STB) is a novel time-resolved 3D Lagrangian part icle tracking method for densely seeded flows. The STB algorithm has been developed at DLR Gottingen in the past two years and uses the prediction of 3D particle distributions for each subsequent time-step as a mean to seize the temporal domain for accurate track reconst ructions based on time series of particle images from few camera project ions. Exploiting the temporal information enables the processing of densely seeded flows (up to and beyond 0.1 particles per pixel with a nearly complete suppression of ghost particles). Such high particle t rajectory densities are a precondition for interpolating the corresponding time-resolved 3D velocity vector field onto a regular grid using NS-constraints.