Wall Interference Assessment of Isolated Fixed-Pitch Propeller Tests

The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is emergent throughout every industrial sector worldwide. For aviation, this has opened a market gap for small scale electric aircraft configurations (e-V/STOL). These configurations are very diverse and they are classified based on how lift is obtained. However, their flight...

Extending the velocity range of Robotic Volumetric PIV: Desing and application of a multi-Δt approach

Car industry and motorsport development nowadays strongly rely on wind tunnel testing. As the literature survey shows, in order to fully understand the characteristics of the flow around a car, large-scale and volumetric flow field measurements are required. For its features, PIV can be pointed as a useful technique for automotive wind tunnels....

Characterization of junction flow under the influence of passive flow control devices: An experimental study with large-scale tomographic PTV technique

Junction flow denotes the fluid phenomenon where the flow on a flat surface encounters a protuberance. This type of flow, which is highly three-dimensional, turbulent and unsteady, usually leads to the generation of a Horseshoe vortex at the obstacle's leading edge. Existing extensive experimental and numerical studies focus on the inception of...

Robotic Volumetric Particle Tracking Velocimetry by Coaxial Imaging and Illumination

Aerodynamics research and development often involves large-scale and turbulent flows; may this be a rotor flow, the wake of a car, or the flow passing a human athlete to name a few examples. Volumetric particle image velocimetry (PIV) is well suited for the study of such flows. The introduction of Helium Filled Soap Bubbles (HFSB) for wind...

Vortex velocimetry of air flows using Helium Filled Soap Bubbles (HFSB)

This thesis work illustrates the first of its kind solution to this problem of lack of seeding at vortex core in air flows, by the use of Helium Filled Soap Bubble (HFSB) which is a neutrally buoyant tracer particle in air flows. To analyse the lack of seeding in the vortex core, a 2D numerical simulation of particle motion in vortex flow is...

On the tracing fidelity of helium-filled soap bubbles for PIV experiments

This thesis follows a previous study on the aerodynamic characterization of helium-filled soap bubbles (HFSBs) for large-scale PIV measurements and aims at characterizing statistically the tracing fidelity of HFSBs in PIV experiments, considering the statistical distribution of the bubbles diameter, slip velocity, relaxation time and density....