On the noise in statistics of PIV measurements

Abstract: It is argued herein that when PIV is used to measure turbulence, it can be treated as a time-dependent signal. The ‘output’ velocity consists of three primary contributions: the time-dependent velocity, a noise arising from the quantization (or pixelization), and a noise contribution from the fact that the velocity is not uniform inside the interrogation volume. For both of the latter, their variances depend inversely on the average number of particles or images in this interrogation volume. All three of these are spatially filtered by the finite extent of the interrogation window. Since the above noises are associated directly with the individual particles (or particle images), the noise between different realizations and different interrogation volumes is statistically independent. Graphic abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].