Instantaneous estimation and three-dimensional reconstruction of a highly modulated velocity field using finite-impulse-response-based spectral proper orthogonal decomposition

An adaptable estimation technique is presented to reconstruct time-evolving three dimensional (3-D) velocity fields from planar particle image velocimetry measurements. The methodology builds on the multi-time-delay estimation technique of Hosseini et al. (2015) by implementing the finite-impulse-response spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (FIR-SPOD) of Sieber et al. (2016). The candidate flow is the highly modulated turbulent near wake of a cantilevered square cylinder with a height-to-width ratio $h/d=4$ , protruding a thin laminar boundary layer ( $\delta /d=0.21$ with $\delta$ being the boundary layer thickness) at the Reynolds number $Re=10600$ , based on d. The novelty of the estimation technique is in using the modal space obtained by FIR-SPOD to better isolate the spatio-temporal scales for correlating velocity and pressure modes. Using FIR-SPOD, irregular coherent contributions at frequencies centred at $f_{ac1}=(1\pm 0.05)f_s$ and $f_{ac2}=(1\pm 0.1)f_s$ (with $f_s$ the fundamental shedding frequency) could be separated, which was not possible using proper orthogonal decomposition. With the FIR-SPOD bases, the quality of the estimation improved significantly using only linear terms, and the correct phase relationships between pressure and velocity modes are retained, as is required for synchronizing coherent motions along the height of the obstacle. It is shown that a low-dimensional reconstruction of the flow field successfully captures the cycle-to-cycle variations of the dominant 3-D vortex shedding process, which give rise to vortex dislocation events. Thus, the present methodology shows promise in 3-D reconstruction of challenging turbulent flows, which exhibit non-periodic behaviour or contain multi-scale phenomena.