Microscale 3D flow mapping with μDDPIV

Three-dimensional (3D) quantitative flow visualization by tracking microscale particles has become an invaluable tool in microfluid mechanics. Defocusing digital particle image velocimetry (DDPIV) can recover spatial coordinates by calculating the separation between defocused images generated by an aperture mask with a plurality of pinholes. In this paper, a high-speed 3D micro-DDPIV (μDDPIV) system was devised based on this technique to achieve microscale velocity field measurements. A micro-volume of 400 × 300 μm^2 with a depth of 150 μm has been mapped using an inverted microscope equipped with a 20× objective lens. The proposed technique was successfully applied to 3D tracking of 2-μm fluorescent particles inside an evaporating water droplet