PIVlab - Digital Particle Image Velocimetry Tool for MATLAB

Mehdi (Manager Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering) from MATHWORKS (the company behind Matlab) approached me a while ago and we discussed how they can support the development of PIVlab. PIVlab seems to be have some importance a relevance to MATHWORKS as it is a pretty popular 3rd party toolbox for Matlab. Together, we identified potential areas in PIVlab that could be improved and MATHWORKS then initiated an internal proposal for programming support. They selected the dutch company Vortech.nl for this project, and Maarten then started to optimize the most important part of PIVlab "PIV_fftmulti.m". He significantly improved the speed of calculations (factor 3), and lowered the memory consumption enormously. This especially helps when processing large images with fine grids, and also makes it possible to benefit from parallel processing of large images. This hasn't been possible before, because at some point RAM was full and the hard disk was used to store temporary dat...

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...

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 )

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: