Study of spanwise vortices in turbulent boundary layer flow based on tomographic PIV

Tomographic particle image velocimetry (Tomo-PIV )is a novel laser technique that can be applied to measure a three-dimensional three-component (3D3C)velocity field.In the current work,Tomo-PIV was utilized to measure a plate turbulent boundary layer (TBL)at Reτ= 1768,and 150 velocity fields with each size of 80mm×16mm×45mm were obtained.The swirl strengthλci was used to identify the local vortex,while its proj ection on the spanwise directionλzci was used to identify the spanwise vortex.The spatial coherent structures of spanwise vortices and their population trends along the wall-normal direction were studied through swirling strengthλzci .The statistic results suggest that the strength of the spanwise vortices reduces with the in-crease of the wall-normal distance y+ .The streamwise velocity of retrograde spanwise vortices is higher than that of the prograde vortices and there is a strong dependence between the streamwise velocity and the wall-normal velocity.High or low momentum regions of small scale in the stre-amwise and wall-normal plane are highly correlated with the spatial arrangement of spanwise vor-tices.Some 3D plots of instantaneous flow structures in TBL are presented and discussed at the end of the paper.