The measurement of flows around objects such as cars, airfoils and maritime structures often poses major challenges for optical flow diagnostics methods such as Tomo-PIV or Lagrangian Particle Tracking (LPT)/Shake-the-Box (STB) within the measurement fields. Also, many flow reconstruction algorithms simply do not have the capabilities of incorporating such object information.

For this reason, measurements are often limited to observations directly behind the object (characterization of wake flows) or to the stitching of averaged flow fields in sub-sampled regions in order to avoid having negative impacts on the measurement data.

To solve this practical problem, LaVision introduces the novel Object-aware Lagrangian Particle Tracking (OA-LPT) method to seamlessly integrate the knowledge about the presence of view-obstructing objects in the measurement domain during the 3D particle reconstruction.
It minimizes the occurrence of reconstruction artifacts and provides a measurement approach for instantaneous 360° LPT/STB measurements around the objects of interest.

Read the open-access publication from Measurement Science and Technology journal here.