Abstract Sediment wear is one of the important reasons for the damage of hydraulic machinery components, and the motion characteristics of sediment are the key factors to determine the degree of wear damage. In order to reveal the mechanism of sediment wear of turbine guide vane, motion characteristics of sediment near the wall of NACA0012 cascade were studied by PIV test method. In this research, fluorescent and sediment particles were used as tracer particles respectively, and the particle images of solid and liquid phases were recorded by double-camera synchronous imaging method. Finally, the synchronous velocity field of solid and liquid phases was determined by correlation analysis of particle images. The experimental results show that the PIV test method can accurately determine the motion characteristics of the solid phase. There is velocity slip between the solid phase and the liquid phase, and the velocity deviation is related to the factors of particle characteristics and Reynolds number.