Experimental determination of tomographic PIV accuracy by a 12-camera system

A tomographic PIV system composed of 12 cameras has been used to study the object reconstruction accuracy over a wide range of values for the concentration of tracer particles. The relations between particle image density, number of cameras, reconstruction quality, and velocity field accuracy are determined experimentally. The effect of additional cameras is quantified by the reconstruction signal-to-noise ratio and normalized intensity variance. Furthermore, the variation of the reconstruction quality factor with seeding density and number of cameras is estimated considering the 12 cameras case as reference, which has so far only been investigated using numerical simulations.