Domain-Adapted Deep Optical Flow for Multiphase Velocimetry in Unsteady Cloud Cavitation

Abstract

Time-resolved velocimetry inside cloud cavitation remains a fundamental measurement problem. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) requires uniform tracer seeding and undistorted particle images, and cavitating flow violates both, because tracers do not penetrate vapor structures and refractive index mismatch across deforming interfaces produces spurious vectors. We present a domain-adapted deep optical flow framework for two-phase velocimetry, built on a Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms (RAFT) architecture fine-tuned on synthetic image pairs rendered from multiphase OpenFOAM simulations (RAFT-CloudCav). It is evaluated against a pre-trained generalist RAFT model, Farnebäck and OpenPIV on 130,000 frames/s recordings of a Venturi test section at 30 and 48 L/min. As no experimental ground truth exists, validation uses three quantities that require none, namely the integrated flow rate against a turbine meter, the liquid-phase velocity divergence, which mass conservation requires to vanish, and the station-to-station spread of the flow rate. RAFT-CloudCav recovers 47.75 L/min against a metered 48.0 $\pm$ 0.5 L/min, the closest of the four methods, and its flow rate varies by 2.0% across four streamwise stations, versus 6-7% for the classical methods. It returns a coherent near-wall reverse flow of -0.71 m/s, the time-averaged signature of the upstream-propagating re-entrant jet, where OpenPIV returns none. In the non-cavitating control, at 51 $\mu$m/pixel only three grid points fall inside a 0.68 mm boundary layer and the peak wall-normal gradient is under-predicted more than thirtyfold, while 13 and 19 $\mu$m/pixel agree with each other. The mean field is recovered without tracer particles at roughly three times the per-frame uncertainty. Uncertainties are estimated a posteriori from the image residual and propagated conservatively.

arXiv comment39 pages, 17 figures, 6 tables. Submitted to Experiments in Fluids