PIV measurements in the vicinity of a steam sparger in the PANDA facility

To eliminate the bubbles as scattering centres we used Rhodamine-B seeding particles for the PIV measurements. These particles emit light in the red spectrum and with a red filter in front of the camera, only those particles contribute to the velocity calculation. Using degassed water together with Rhodamin-B particles it was finally possible to record velocity fields even in this demanding environment for high steam mass flow rates. The paper contains a description of the methods developed to perform PIV measurements in the vicinity of the sparger and a selection of the results obtained.