PIVlab - Digital Particle Image Velocimetry Tool for MATLAB

Soon, PIVlab will be more than just a PIV post-processing tool! I am currently implementing some additional features, so that PIVlab can control our laser and the camera directly. I am doing this, because we are using PIVlab for commercial services, and I want to have a PIV setup that is really handy in practice. I also developed a small synchronizer (see picture) that controls our Quantel Evergreen 200 PIV laser and synchronizes it with the ILA5150 PIV.Nano double-image camera. And this synchronizer (which is wireless by the way) is also controlled directly from PIVlab. Everything is as simple as it can get: Press a single button to start camera and laser, images will be saved to your hard disk and directly loaded into PIVlab. Awesome! If you want to have this too for your research, you'll need the PIVlab-SimpleSync ( Optolution.com ), the ILA5150 PIV.Nano camera, and a double-puls laser (e.g. Quantel EVG00070). The PIVlab-SimpleSync wireless synchronizer controls Lamp 1&2, Q...

Since quite a while, Matlab File Exchange offers the opportunity to link to a GitHub repository. So I just created a PIVlab repository on GitHub, and changed the Matlab File Exchange site accordingly. I hope that this works out smoothly, and everyone benefits from this change! Here is the link to GitHub: https://github.com/Shrediquette/PIVlab And here is the modified File Exchange site: https://de.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/27659

New features: The user can now load time-resolved masks instead of single masks The user can now select the color of the color legend label The PIV settings are now checked automatically, and a warning is given if unusual parameters were selected  Bug fixes: Loading session files from older PIVlab versions is now possible ( forum post ) Fixed bug where the tools panel showed slightly incorrect data sometimes ( forum post ) Fixed bug where a warning message was displayed too often ( forum post )

I am making progress with the r2014 update of PIVlab, several incompatibilities are fixed already. This requires some extra attention, because PIVlab must stay compatible with earlier Matlab releases. I think that I will be ready to post a beta release of PIVlab 1.4 at the end of this week.

PIVlab v 1.1, added features / improvements: better smoothing algorithm (smoothn.m) if supported (otherwise gaussian kernel is used) removed several known bugs/ pitfalls added a feature to extract tangential velocity along a series of circles with increasing radius (useful to calculate vortex circulation) added a feature to extract circulation via integrating the vorticity over area for a series of an increasing area added a feature to calculate the weighted centroid of derived parameters improvements in the particle image generation algorithm added several flow simulations (including Hamel-Oseen vortices and vortex pairs) vector width is user selectable Download PIVlab @ Matlab Central

PIVlab is now available for download (see right hand side of this blog for the link). Here is a recent video showing a standard PIV analysis:

Here are some images that were analyzed with PIVlab. Click for higher resolution.

Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is a method to measure space- and time-resolved flow velocities in fluids. I will work a lot with this method during my PhD. In the past, I got to know some commercial PIV software systems (e.g. " Flowmanager " and " VidPIV "), but I was never totally happy with these. I also had a look at several free PIV systems (mostly based on MATLAB ), but these were not suitable for my demands. Since I am going to spend a lot of time with PIV calculations, E.J. Stamhuis and me recently developed a PIV software (called PIVlab) that takes advantage of numerous MATLAB features. I also created an extensive GUI for the software which makes it easy to get results with ease.