The non-intrusive optical tomography method of volumetric velocity field measurements in the flow is described. The essence of the method is the evaluation of the flow velocity inside the measurement volume by determining the displacement of tracer particles during a short time period between the laser pulses. The main difference of Tomographic Particle Image Velocimetry from the standard Particle Image Velocimetry is the tomographic reconstruction of the three-dimensional image. One of the major problems hindering the wide dissemination of this method is currently the high computational resource consumption, large amount of disk and RAM memory needed for the Tomo PIV data processing.
Software algorithms for experimental data processing obtained using tomographic digital image velocimetry were implemented by the authors of the paper. Also the tomographic reconstruction accuracy and the particle displacement assessment error were studied using synthetic images. The described tomographic method of volumetric flow velocity field estimation was used for the diagnostics of a turbulent submerged jet flowing into a narrow channel. An experimental application of the developed approaches for the first time allowed obtaining the volumetric spatial distribution of the mean velocity field and three-dimensional instantaneous velocity fields.