Performance evaluation of a Scheimpflug stereocamera for particle image velocimetry.

We describe a novel stereocamera for particle image velocimetry (PIV) applications that incorporates the Scheimpflug condition that the object plane, lens plane, and image plane must be collinear. We examined the governing equations for this system using a computer-based sensitivity analysis to predict the accuracy of the in-plane and out-of-plane measurement. We evaluated the performance of the Scheimpflug PIV system with a three-dimensional uniform translation test. Results indicate that the Scheimpflug PIV stereocamera performs as expected. The larger off-axis angles possible with the Scheimpflug system can provide a higher accuracy in the out-of-plane component when compared with a translation PIV stereocamera.