European High-Performance Infrastructures
in Turbulence

Acoustic particle tracking (APT) is a scattering technique based on Doppler velocimetry that directly gives particles velocities (in contrast to classical optical PTV which gives particles positions) without need of signal differentiation, and so has a high SNR. Another benefit of APT is that only one “pixel” (which is here one acoustic receiver) is required to determine each velocity component of a particle. This reduces significantly the amount of raw data that must be processed with the caveat that not so many particles can be tracked simultaneously. An interesting aspect of APT is that by changing the scattering angle and the signal processing, the same apparatus can be used to measure the 3D spectral modes of the vorticity field in turbulent flows without the need of seeding particles (turbulent vortices act themselves as acoustic scatterers). The present project aims at implementing such a 3D-APT technique in GTF1.