Particle Image Velocimetry Visualization and Measurement of Airflow Over a Wall-Mounted Radiator

A common room-heating technique involves the use of a wall-mounted radiator without forced convection. The cold surrounding air passes adjacent to the warm surfaces of the radiator where it absorbs heat and gains momentum to rise along the wall surface and finally circulate in the entire room. Understanding the properties of heated airflows is important for several purposes. To understand the flow process it is important to identify where the transition from laminar to turbulent flow occurs and to quantify the turbulent fluctuations. With the objective to characterize the airflow in the vicinity of wall surfaces, the local climate over the radiator was visualized and measured using a two-dimensional particle image velocimetry technique. The PIV technique yields 2D vector fields of the flow. The resulting vector maps were properly validated and post-processed using in-house software to provide the average streamlines and other statistical information such as standard deviation, average velocity, and covariance of the entire vector field. The results show that, for a room with a typical heating power, the airflow over the radiator becomes agitated after an ordinate of N = 5 - 6.25 over the radiator upper level, in which N is the dimensionless length based on the thickness of the radiator. Practical problems encountered in near-wall PIV measurements include generating a homogeneous global seeding that makes it possible to study both plume and entraining region, as well as optical problems due to near-surface laser reflection that makes the measurement process more complicated.