Surface pressure reconstruction from LPT data with boundary conforming grids

Abstract The coupling between fluid-structure interactions is governed by the pressure distribution over the interaction surface between the fluid and solid domains. The capabilities of non-intrusive optical techniques, such as particle image velocimetry and Lagrangian particle tracking (LPT), have been proven to provide accurate velocity and acceleration information within the flow field while simultaneously tracking the corresponding structural deformations. However, scattered data from LPT measurements are typically mapped onto Cartesian grids, independently of the shape of the solid objects in the measurement domain. The use of Cartesian grids poses challenges for the determination of the surface pressure because the velocity gradients close to the object’s surface are not captured accurately. Therefore, an alternative surface pressure reconstruction scheme utilizing LPT data based on the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian approach is proposed to mitigate the error propagation associated with the use of uniform grids. The introduced method provides an exact surface conformation utilizing boundary fitted coordinate systems and radial basis function based mesh deformations, which eliminates the need to use extrapolations to obtain surface pressure distributions. The introduced approach is assessed by means of a synthetic hill surface probing a three-dimensional analytical flow field; its practical applicability is demonstrated through an experimental characterization of turbulent boundary layer interactions with a steadily and unsteadily deforming elastic membrane.