Background Oriented Schlieren measurements of natural convection from a MEMS flow sensors

Yoav Kessler, our Ph.D. jointly co-advised by Prof. Slava Krylov , has created a new line of the MEMS flow sensors. These are miniature double-clamped bistable prebuckled beams of the order of 20 microns in size are invisible in this image. We can see a PCB card on which the sensor is installed. Joule’s heating is applied with a DC current and the overheat ratio of the sensor leads to the natural convection. The optically valuable method is the Background Oriented Schlieren or sometimes called synthetic Schlieren. A board with a random pattern is located behind the object and the high magnification macroscopic lens is installed with a background illumination. The diffused light passes through a hot air above the sensor and the density variations are analysed by cross-correlation of the static and dynamic patterns. Read more about our open source OpenPIV-BOS package and the work of Dr. Lilly Verso.