Gridded Analysis of Volumetric Particle Velocity Data

2-Frame and time-resolved Volumetric Particle Tracking has become an increasingly valuable tool for 3-D flow characterization. Unstructured, randomly-distrubted data are typically produced by tracking individual particle locations either between 2 sequential image frames or by constructing longer Lagrangian particle position tracks to from highly time-resolved data. High-resolution datasets are typically interpolated onto an ordered grid in order to provide greater convenience in data presentation and to facilitate calculation of derived quantities. Interpolation schemes are compared for accuracy and resolution, and robustness to spurious data points. Improvements are proposed to provide for increased resilience against noise and spurious data points in experimental data sets. Results are compared to standard Gaussian-weighted interpolation. Single- realization and statistical results are presented from analysis of synthetic and experimental datasets.