Tomographic particle-image velocimetry and thermography in Rayleigh-Benard convection using suspended thermochromic liquid crystals and digital image processing

Steady-state flow and temperature fields in shallow rectangular enclosures heated from below were visualized and quantitatively characterized by using glycerol as the working fluid and suspended thermochromic liquid crystals as tracers. Couples of photographs taken on 120 transparency film for two orthogonal sets of vertical plane sections were digitized by a 1,200-dpi flatbed scanner and split into HSL (hue-saturation-lightness) components by using commercial general-purpose image processing software. Two-dimensional velocity fields were obtained from the lightness component by a two-frame cross-correlation technique using a commercial particle-image velocimetry (PIV) package. Temperature fields were obtained from the hue component on the basis of an in situ calibration procedure, conducted under conditions of stable thermal stratification. Finally, 2D flow and temperature distributions were interpolated by a purpose-written Fortran program to give 3D flow and thermal fields in the enclosure. Results are presented here for the case of a 1:2:4 aspect ratio cavity at a Rayleigh number of 14,500, for which a complex 3D flow and temperature distribution was observed.