Optimization and testing of the tomographic method of velocity measurement in the flow volume

The optic noncontact method of velocity field measurement in the flow volume is considered in this paper for the purposes of hydroaerodynamic experiment. The essence of this method is measurement of particles motion in the flow during short periods between laser pulses. This study offers and implements several algorithmic optimizations, allowing data processing time reduction. It is shown that application of threshold background filtering on the recorded projections (particle images) and fast estimation of initial intensity distribution in the volume allows increasing the speed of tomographic reconstruction algorithm two or three times. Reconstruction accuracy and errors in determination of particle shift were studied in this work using artificial images. The described tomographic method for the velocity field estimation in the flow volume was used for diagnostics of a turbulent submerged jet flowing into a narrow channel. The application of developed approaches in experiment allowed us to obtain spatial distribution of the average velocity field and instantaneous velocity fields in the measurement area.