Effect of acoustic doppler velocimeter sampling volume size on measurements of turbulence

Abstract

The relatively large sampling volume of acoustic Doppler velocimeters (ADVs) is expected to influence their measurement of turbulence. To study this effect, a series of experiments using different sampling volume sizes was conducted in an axisymmetric turbulent jet. The results show that the mean velocities are not significantly affected by the size of the sampling volume. On the other hand, reducing the sampling volume size results in an increase in the variances of the u and y velocities, while its effect on the variance of the w velocity is negligible. Application of a noise-reduction method to the data renders the velocity variances nearly independent of sampling volume size, suggesting that the difference was mainly due to Doppler noise. The principal conclusion of this work is, therefore, that—as long as the characteristic length of sampling volume is much smaller than the integral length scale of flow—increasing the sampling volume size (i.e., increasing spatial averaging over highly correlated scatterers) can reduce Doppler noise and result in more accurate measurements of the velocity variances. Application of noise-reduction methods to the data is found to be especially important when the sampling volume size is reduced to capture smaller scales, or for near-boundary measurements. Furthermore, noise due to mean velocity shear, even at the largest velocity gradient along the jet radial profile, is found to be negligible in the present work.