Shaking Outside the Box to Advance Flight Research

Lagrangian Particle Tracking (LPT) is a popular flow visualization technique that lets scientists track tracer particles in a three-dimensional volume using high-speed cameras. This method plays an important role in many fluid mechanics studies, particularly those that investigate turbulent flows.

Pushing the boundaries of this technique, some researchers are beginning to use multiple high-speed cameras driven by sophisticated 3D measurement software which uses temporal information contained in time-resolved data sets to track particles in densely seeded flows. This newer technique, called Shake the Box (STB), predicts the positions of already tracked particles and then corrects errors using image matching. The algorithms triangulate the positions of new particles in the measurement domain, enabling scientists to look at higher-particle densities with greater positional accuracy compared to traditional LPT.