Yes, PIV is also there. No doubts. It's not clear why Dantec (he he he) website is linked to the explanation of PIV (I mean, why not to URAPIV blog, for example?), but still, it's a nice application. very nice.
http://www.earthsky.org/shows/show.php?date=20060429
this is the noisy jet engine. How do you know where most of the noise is produced? right. you do PIV.
Recent article in J. Magnet. Reson. (i guess it is magnetic resonance) reports on 1 meter-per-second flow, measured with some special trick and NMR. That's what we call "serious" competition.
Biplab Das's blog reports about Smart-PIV project:
A New Technique To Improve Heart Implants’ Design
A technology used to measure airflow over wings can now be used to keep ailing hearts in good shape. Known as Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system, the technology has been optimised in a way that it could accurately measure the effects of medical implants on blood flow. This new avatar of PIV will help medical device manufacturers to improve the design of artificial implanted devices like heart valves and pumps. At the same time, it will be an indispensable tool for doctors to pin down and correct side-effects that affect patients having such implants.
read more on the original blog >>>
cross post from the dubious quality blog
There's a fascinating article over at the National Science Foundation about how hummingbirds fly. Here's an excerpt on their methodology:
In this study, the researchers applied "digital particle imaging velocimetry" (DPIV) to follow the flapping wings. DPIV is used in various applications to study flow characteristics of liquids and gases. By taking pictures with a special computer-coupled camera lighted with a laser, the distance traveled by individual particles seeded in a liquid or gas can be tracked through successive images. Hence, DPIV allows the researchers to follow the particles' movement image by image, like looking through the pages of a high-tech flipbook.
To observe the hummingbird in flight, the air in a wind tunnel was seeded with microscopic particles of olive oil, and digital images were captured every 300 microseconds as the bird hovered at a feeder. The wing beats caused the air to circulate, which in turn caused the floating oil particles to move. Computer-aided image analysis of each oil particle's position in consecutive frames allowed the scientists to reconstruct the lift and characteristics associated with each up and down wing movement.
So I feel really stupid now, which is fortunately kind of a hobby of mine.
Here's the link:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104263&org=NSF.
And this image is from another blog (Invisible Cinema) about the same work. This time it's a real data:
Alex just found that in 1932, A. Fage and H.C.H. Townend published an article in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (Series A), vol. 135, No. 828, pp. 656-677, which is: "An Examination of Turbulent Flow with an Ultramicroscope".
Are you kidding me :-)?
And were waiting until 1998 to reinvent it as microPIV?
Look at the sketch and tell me if they didn't do also Nano-PIV?
The full article is available through JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org
We are not sure if we are allowed to show here the copy of the figures which are most probably copyrighted, but it is so striking when we see such a thing and it's impossible to express it otherwise. We argue not to copy this images and purchase the original article from JSTOR. We add the copyright notice as it is provided by JSTOR:
I want to break free …. (Queen)
URAPIV wants to break free … (of Mathworks licensing policy) 
URAPIV now is also*
PyPIV, where Py is for Python (http://www.python.org)
* means that we are not going to drop the Matlab toolbox, but in parallel we are going to enter a new field: ABSOLUTELY FREE OPEN SOURCE PIV ANALYSIS (as they say think of "free as beer"). Even kids in a primary school in Gana can do PIV now - it's free as Python programming language is free, it's free as Python Imaging Library is free, it's free as Scientific Python is free.
If you install totally free OS for human beings - Ubuntu (or any other Linux distribution), you have Python built-in
If you have Windows, download an excellent distribution from Enthought Inc. and run the Windows installer. You'll have Python working in a minute.
If you're in Mac OS X, we still have not tested it, but MacPython is there and Fink is there, so it should be straightforward installation.
Happy PIVing to all
Here's a screenshot of PyPIV on a PC with Windows XP and Enthough Python at the background:
If you open Physics Today, December 2005 issue, you’ll find out an excellent artcile about Ludwig Prandtl’s Boundary Layer theory by John D Anderson Jr. Turbulent Boundary Layer is our “favorite” turbulent flow (see below the work we’ve done in the turbulent boundary layer flows, or follow the links to the authors, Uri, Roi or Alex)
We are proud to be a humble member of the experimental fluid mechanics community, working both in Physics and Engineering areas.
For those who cannot afford to subscribe for this journal or those who’s in engineering and never read this magazine, i made an unprofessional, ugly scan of the article. Please, use it only for the personal reading and do not distribute it. All the rights are reserved to Physics Today.
Our recent user, Jose Manuel Pedrero Canovas from University of University Miguel Hernandez of Elche (Spain) has provided us with very nice overview of his research and the results of URAPIV. He wrote us:
Here I send you some results of my experiments. As you can see, I use ‘overlapping’ to get more measurement points.
I compare the theoretical curve with the values obtained for each volume (liters/hour), as well as recording frequency (fps) and values of ITT and SPC. They are very good and these are the initial experiments to be able to extrapolate the work method to others in which we do not have theoretical solution.
We’ll continue in contact and thaks for the help!
The results look like: 
in which we can observe a typical profile of an anular flow in a tube with an inner axis. We helped a bit with customizing the old Matlab version of URAPIV (for Matlab 6.5 or R13) and TIFF images that looked like this one:
obtained in the following facility:
Technorati [more info about the site] has registered velocimetry tag. Amazingly cool, it points to URAPIV (through the openscience.org).
