Development of an advanced software for a single aperture Defocusing Micro Particle Tracking Velocimetry application

The research and development of novel fluids for high-efficient absorption heat pump applications require a detailed analysis of microscopic liquid flows. For this purpose, a Defocusing Micro Particle Tracking Velocimetry approach has been successfully implemented using an existing PIV-setup. Due to the lack of commercial software for our application, an image processing software was developed in order to evaluate fluid flows from the recorded images. We show that the use of a modified Circular Hough Transform for particle detection, as well as a matching algorithm using normalized radial brightness distributions of the particles instead of conventional cross-correlation, result in a significantly higher performance and a shorter computation time.