A Meshless Method to Measure Pressure Fields from Image Velocimetry via Radial Basis Functions

In the past years the interest in computing pressure from image velocimetry has increased. However, only few researchers tried to implement meshless methods (see Gesemann et al., 2016). Such techniques appear to be increasingly promising following the recent advances in both computational power and machine learning algorithms. Furthermore, no meshless methods exploiting Radial Basis Functions have been found in the literature, at least applied in this context. The meshless method proposed here adds information from fluid dynamics theory directly to the data, using the former to correct the latter. The core of this thesis is to develop the mathematical basis of such method and to implement and test it. Two test cases are presented, with the objective of validating both theory and the implementation of this work. The obtained results show some interesting features of the method, which well treats noisy data, for instance. This method is still at an early stage, and there is surely large margin for improvement.