Carlos Mastrangelo University of Utah
Flow field mapping is essential in understanding of flows in many engineering fields in the biomedical, chemical, oil and aerospace industries. The most widely used methods for quantitative flow velocity visualization is particle image velocimetry or PIV. PIV is tremendously powerful. In PIV the fluid is seeded with tracer particles to determine the magnitude and direction for the velocity field at an arbitrary location. Unlike PIV there is no widely used equivalent technique to determine the equally important complementary pressure field. This capability has been lacking for many decades, and in this proposal it is believed that a feasible technology that can provide the pressure field information in an analogous way as PIV does for the velocity field.
Construction of pressure-sensitive engineered particles and a measurement instrument to implement a Particle Imaging Manometry (PIM) system will be undertaked. The proposed research has three major technical objectives: (1) the design and implementation of a family of pressure-sensing particles remotely interrogated via optical cavity resonance, (2) the development of microfabrication methods for the mass production of the particles, and (3) the design, construction and testing of a high speed spectroscopic microscope setup to demonstrate the feasibility of the PIM technique.
