DEVELOPMENT OF A SCALABLE REAL-TIME LAGRANGIAN PARTICLE TRACKING SYSTEM FOR VOLUMETRIC FLOW FIELD CHARACTERIZATION BY

ii Lagrangian particle tracking (LPT) is important for the study of turbulence and the inertial behavior of particles in natural and industrial flow fields. This work describes the development of a new scalable real-time LPT system which is able to track particles in large scale 3D turbulent flow fields. A statistical accumulator grid concept was developed to attribute the measured Lagrangian velocities and accelerations of particles to a Cartesian framework for comparison with Eularian based measurements and simulations. Real-time processing was achieved through development of parallel frameworks based on fine and coarse grain problem decomposition for heterogeneous computing architectures. The first framework is based on exposing task and data parallelism through a streaming pipeline within each multi-core processor node. The second framework is based on pipelining temporal data through a unique message passing algorithm in order to utilize large clusters containing hundreds of processor nodes. A sensitivity analysis was completed based on the derivation of measurement uncertainty. It was shown that by utilizing groups of four cameras in the 3D reconstruction process, th