Special-purpose computer for Particle Image Velocimetry

Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is a method of obtaining velocity field. A HORN-5 is a special-purpose computer had 4 FPGAs. We designed a circuit for PIV with an 8×88×8 two-dimensional 2-radix FFT in a FPGA on the HORN-5 and compared its calculation speed with that of a PC by using a C++ code. As a result, the calculation speed of the FPGA was found to be 8.93 times faster than that of the PC. Moreover, the system was adopted for reading artificial PIV standard images and real experimental images. On the numerical accuracy, the velocity vectors of both results were also found to be in good agreement with that of the PC by FORTRAN code.