Application of holographic particle image velocimetry in bubbly flow

Measuring the velocity field of a bubbly flow is of major importance in many industrial applications like, bubble column reactors. Traditional PIV setup is limited to single plane measurements. The present study involved extension of the existing holographic PIV method to two-phase flow velocimetry. The objective of the present study was to conduct velocity measurements using in-line holographic microscopy arrangement to analyze a flow consisting of an air bubble rising through stagnant water in a rectangular column. Neutrally buoyant 8 µm sized hollow glass spheres are scattered uniformly in the continuous phase and are used as seed particles for image analysis. Double-pulsed hologram is taken with a 2K by 2K pixels CCD sensor with 200µs in between the two frames, which allows only a small movement of both the particles (in the continuous phase) and that of the dispersed phase itself. Holograms are reconstructed at different distances to produce images at every millimeter of the measurement volume. An averaging technique is developed to process the images to reduce the noise in reconstructed holographic images and make it useful for cross-correlation analysis. The image pairs are cross correlated and velocity vectors are obtained for the continuous phase. The dispersed phase velocity is measured using the shift in the center of the bubble. After analyses of all the image pairs throughout the measurement volume, a two component three dimensional velocity field is produced for the two-phase flow.