Acquisition of the tide-induced Lagrangian residual current field by the PIV technique in the laboratory

In this paper, a new particle image velocimetry (PIV)-based measurement method is proposed to obtain the high-resolution tide-induced Lagrangian residual current field in the laboratory. A long gravity wave was generated to simulate the tide in a narrow tank full of water laden with PIV particles. Consecutive charge-coupled device (CCD) images were recorded with the studied layer illuminated with a laser beam. Two images separated by one tidal period were processed by applying the pattern-matching algorithm to get the horizontal tide-induced Lagrangian residual current field. The results coincide with sporadic results from the traditional surface-float tracing method, but with much higher spatial resolution and accuracy. Furthermore, it is found that the direct acquisition of the Lagrangian residual current may reduce the error at least by one order compared with those acquisition methods that require the detailed information of the tidal cycle.