Quantitative Measurement of Temperature Gradient in Natural Heat Convection Using Color-Stripe Background Oriented Schlieren (CSBOS) Technique and Computed Tomography (CT) Method

Quantitative image analysis and measurement of flow fields in convective heat transfer has great importance for the optimum energy consumption problems. In natural and forced convection phenomena of fluids, the complexity of flow field prevents us from detailed three dimensional (3D) experimental analyses of steady/unsteady dynamics in fluids. These flow fields have locally different density and temperature values and yet to be observed quantitatively. Recent development of the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) techniques lead us to the quantitative investigation of flow fields in experimental researches. On the other hand, in image measurements density and temperature distributions have been grasped only in two-dimensions (2D). These qualitative image analyses of flow fields were obtained by using classical flow visualizing techniques, such as shadowgraph and color schlieren method. This paper describes the quantitative measurement of convective flow field using our originally proposed color striped background oriented schlieren (CSBOS) method. The obtained measured image data is used for CT reconstruction and 3D temperature gradient distributions.