ADV-Explorer

ADV-Explorer is a free desktop application for analyzing acoustic Doppler velocimetry (ADV) measurements, such as those recorded with a Nortek Vectrino or UBERTONE profilers in laboratory flumes, or with a SonTek FlowTracker2 in rivers.

The ADV-Explorer main window: interactive flume top view (top) and time series plot frame (bottom).

About

Flume experiments with ADV probes produce large numbers of point measurements that need quality control before any velocity statistic can be trusted: spikes from air bubbles or weak acoustic seeding must be filtered, probe misalignment must be corrected, and every measurement position must be tracked in a consistent coordinate system. Doing this with one-off scripts is tedious and error prone, and it makes results hard to reproduce or share.

ADV-Explorer replaces individual scripts and operator-error prone workflows with one interactive interface:

• Measurement points are placed on a top view of the flume with a consistent coordinate reference system (origin at the center of the inlet, x pointing downstream, y toward the right bank, z upward from the bottom).

• Velocity time series are inspected visually and cleaned with established despiking filters (correlation and signal-to-noise thresholds, velocity thresholding, Goring and Nikora 2002 methods, phase-space thresholding).

• Turbulence statistics (mean, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, Reynolds stresses, turbulent kinetic energy, and dissipation rate) are computed per point and per vertical profile.

• Probe misalignment is corrected per vertical profile with proposed or manual heading, pitch, and roll rotations.

• An entire analysis, including all raw data, lives in one standalone .advProj project file that opens on almost any computer.

• Field surveys are handled in an extra mode, where measurement points are georeferenced in a coordinate system of the user’s choice and drawn on an OpenStreetMap basemap, whole FlowTracker2 cross sections are imported at once, and turbulence quantities are labelled based on the sampling rate the instrument achieves.

Contents

• Installation
  • Requirements
  • Windows 10/11
  • Linux
  • Updating
  • Building from source
• Usage
  • Start with an example
  • The flume coordinate system
  • Defining measurement points
  • Time series analysis
  • Vertical profiles and probe alignment
  • Exporting results
  • Projects
  • Processing settings
  • Field mode: FlowTracker2 river surveys
• Developer guide
  • Requirements
  • Building
  • Tests
  • Architecture
  • Things that are easy to break
  • Releases and continuous integration
  • Documentation screenshots

License

ADV-Explorer is released under the GNU General Public License v3. The source code is available at github.com/sschwindt/ADV-Explorer.