Ultrasonic Measurement of Instantaneous Velocity Vector Profile

This paper proposes a new technique that enables the measurement of an instantaneous velocity vector profile in multi-dimensions on a line of the flow field. A system to achieve this goal was developed based on ultrasonic velocity profiling (UVP) by using multiple transducers. A focusing transducer, which reduces the effective diameter of ultrasonic beams around the focal point, was used to minimize the spatial uncertainty in the measurement. A two-dimensional system was constructed by using a normal transducer as a receiver and a focusing transducer as both an emitter and a receiver, and successfully applied to an actual flow field, rigid body motion of fluid in a rotating cylinder, for two-dimensional velocity vector measurements. To estimate the influence of existence of an intermediate wall, acoustic field under the developed system was computed by solving two-dimensional wave equation and then the focal point of an ultrasonic beam was determined to optimize the system. The system was applied to measure two dimensional velocity components of a periodic velocity fluctuation in a wake of a cylinder in a shallow channel as an example of unsteady flow. Obtained temporal variation of velocity vector profile confirmed an applicability of the developed system to unsteady flow. The vortex shedding in the wake was well reproduced as in the vorticity distribution, which was computed from the temporal variation of the vector field using Taylor frozen hypothesis. Although a temporal resolution is still not high, we conclude that applicability of the measurement system has been confirmed.