Introduction

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is an indirect, optical technique to measure the flow of fluids. Using a pulsed, high-power illumination source, particles that are within the measurement domain are illuminated. These illuminated particles are then captured using a camera and are often captured in pairs of images. Using two images, the approximate velocity of the particles captured within the images can be correlated in order to obtain spatial velocity information. This principle is the back-bone of flow measurements of particle laden flows (hence particle image velocimetry). While there are numerous high quality commercial and open source PIV software in the market, OpenPIV strives to be a reliable and flexible PIV software capable of processing a variety of different PIV techniques. Implemented in the Python language with optional c++ and other optimizations for performance, it is easy to install and simple to use. OpenPIV is also tested against many different PIV benchmarks and PIV challenges with great agreement with other software vendors.

More to come soon!!