Outstanding Paper Awards 2016

This paper discusses the propagation of the instantaneous uncertainty of PIV measurements to statistical and instantaneous quantities of interest derived from the velocity field. The expression of the uncertainty of vorticity, velocity divergence, mean value and Reynolds stresses is derived. It is shown that the uncertainty of vorticity and velocity divergence requires the knowledge of the spatial correlation between the error of the x and y particle image displacement, which depends upon the measurement spatial resolution. The uncertainty of statistical quantities is often dominated by the random uncertainty due to the finite sample size and decreases with the square root of the effective number of independent samples. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to assess the accuracy of the uncertainty propagation formulae. Furthermore, three experimental assessments are carried out. In the first experiment, a turntable is used to simulate a rigid rotation flow field. The estimated uncertainty of the vorticity is compared with the actual vorticity error root-mean-square, with differences between the two quantities within 5–10% for different interrogation window sizes and overlap factors. A turbulent jet flow is investigated in the second experimental assessment. The reference velocity, which is used to compute the reference value of the instantaneous flow properties of interest, is obtained with an auxiliary PIV system, which features a higher dynamic range than the measurement system. Finally, the uncertainty quantification of statistical quantities is assessed via PIV measurements in a cavity flow. The comparison between estimated uncertainty and actual error demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed uncertainty propagation methodology.

Knowledge of propeller or rotor blade behaviour under real operating conditions is crucial for optimizing the performance of a propeller or rotor system. A team of researchers, technicians and engineers from Avia Propeller, DLR, EVEKTOR and HARDsoft developed a rotating stereo camera system dedicated to in-flight blade deformation measurements. The whole system, co-rotating with the propeller at its full speed and hence exposed to high centrifugal forces and strong vibration, had been successfully tested on an EVEKTOR VUT 100 COBRA aeroplane in Kunovice (CZ) within the project AIM²—advanced in-flight measurement techniques funded by the European Commission (contract no. 266107). This paper will describe the work, starting from drawing the first sketch of the system up to performing the successful flight test. Apart from a description of the measurement hardware and the applied IPCT method, the paper will give some impressions of the flight test activities and discuss the results obtained from the measurements.

Many factors influence the performance of additive manufacturing (AM) processes, resulting in a high degree of variation in process outcomes. Therefore, quantifying these factors and their correlations to process outcomes are important challenges to overcome to enable widespread adoption of emerging AM technologies. In the powder bed fusion AM process, the density of the powder layers in the powder bed is a key influencing factor. This paper introduces a method to determine the powder bed density (PBD) during the powder bed fusion (PBF) process. A complete uncertainty analysis associated with the measurement method was also described. The resulting expanded measurement uncertainty, U_PBD (k  =  2), was determined as 0.004 g · cm⁻³. It was shown that this expanded measurement uncertainty is about three orders of magnitude smaller than the typical powder bed density. This method enables establishing correlations between the changes in PBD and the direction of motion of the powder recoating arm.