Influence of light sheet separation on SPIV measurement in a large field spanwise plane

Stereoscopic particle image velocimetry (SPIV) is nowadays a well-established measurement technique for turbulent flows. However, the accuracy and the spatial resolution are still highly questionable in the presence of complex flow with both strong gradients and out-of-plane motions. To give guidelines for both setup and measurements of such flow configurations, a large region of overlap between two SPIV systems on the same laser light sheet is acquired in a plane normal to the streamwise direction of a high Reynolds turbulent boundary layer flow. A simple separation of the two light sheets is used to improve the accuracy of the measurements by increasing the velocity dynamic range especially. It also presents the enhancement of accuracy due to the light sheet separation for characterizing streamwise vortices (i.e. perpendicular to the sheet). The proposed technique has been demonstrated in the Laboratoire de Mécanique de Lille wind tunnel facility which has been specially designed to study fully developed turbulent boundary layers at high Reynolds numbers. The outlook is to study in detail the physics of the streamwise vortices generated from vortex generators taking advantage of the large scales of this turbulent boundary layer. (paper)