A novel particle tracking velocimetry method for complex granular flow field*

Abstract

Particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) is one of the most commonly applied granular flow velocity measurement methods. However, traditional PTV methods may have issues such as high mismatching rates and a narrow measurement range when measuring granular flows with large bulk density and high-speed contrast. In this study, a novel PTV method is introduced to solve these problems using an optical flow matching algorithm with two further processing steps. The first step involves displacement correction, which is used to solve the mismatching problem in the case of high stacking density. The other step is trajectory splicing, which is used to solve the problem of a measurement range reduction in the case of high-speed contrast The hopper flow experimental results demonstrate superior performance of this proposed method in controlling the number of mismatched particles and better measuring efficiency in comparison with the traditional PTV method.