From Particle Tracks to Velocity and Acceleration Fields Using B-Splines and Penalties

Abstract: In this work a method for reconstructing velocity and acceleration fields is described which uses scattered particle tracking data from flow experiments as input. The goal is to reconstruct these fields faithfully with a limited amount of compute time and exploit known flow properties such as a divergence-free velocity field for incompressible flows and a rotation-free acceleration in case it is known to be dominated by the pressure gradient in order to improve the spatial resolution of the reconstruction.