The unsteady three-dimensional flow organization of jets issued from a duct with swirl vanes at Reynolds number equal to 1000 and swirl number ranging between 0 and 0.8 is investigated. Time-resolved tomographic particle image velocimetry returns the instantaneous flow structure and its evolution by visualization of velocity and vortical features. The most relevant coherent motions are identified and characterized with the aid of dynamic mode decomposition. The time-averaged flow topology indicates that the vanes used to impart the swirling motion have a significant impact on the azimuthal modulation of momentum, with the jet exhibiting four sectors separated by a thin cross-like wake resulting from the boundary layer developed along the vane walls. The flow field is thus characterized by inner and outer shear regions. An increase in swirl, up to moderate levels, causes larger jet spreading angles. Further increase of the swirl number is accompanied by the appearance of a central recirculation zone due to vortex breakdown at which increases in size and is triggered upstream for increasing. Although no shear layer instability development is observed at, already at the swirling motion promotes the growth of helical vortices appearing as Kelvin-Helmholtz waves that deform the outer axial shear layer. The downstream evolution features successive pairing, which is observed for all the considered swirl numbers. The initial development of the instability is independent for each vane, whereas a mutual interaction between the vanes occurs after the vortex pairing. The reconnection from the four sectors vortices induces a significant increase of azimuthal vorticity, which affects the dynamical behaviour of the precessing vortex core. The latter is visualized by a low-order spatio-temporal reconstruction based on few dynamical modes. At a higher swirl number, the axial vorticity component dominates the flow field; it interacts with the azimuthal vorticity, which penetrates inward through the meanders of the vane wakes and forces the vortex core precession and breakdown.

The motion-tracking-enhanced MART (MTE-MART; Novara et al. in Meas Sci Technol 21:035401, 2010) has demonstrated the potential to increase the accuracy of tomographic PIV by the combined use of a short sequence of non-simultaneous recordings. A clear bottleneck of the MTE-MART technique has been its computational cost. For large datasets comprising time-resolved sequences, MTE-MART becomes unaffordable and has been barely applied even for the analysis of densely seeded tomographic PIV datasets. A novel implementation is proposed for tomographic PIV image sequences, which strongly reduces the computational burden of MTE-MART, possibly below that of regular MART. The method is a sequential algorithm that produces a time-marching estimation of the object intensity field based on an enhanced guess, which is built upon the object reconstructed at the previous time instant. As the method becomes effective after a number of snapshots (typically 5–10), the sequential MTE-MART (SMTE) is most suited for time-resolved sequences. The computational cost reduction due to SMTE simply stems from the fewer MART iterations required for each time instant. Moreover, the method yields superior reconstruction quality and higher velocity field measurement precision when compared with both MART and MTE-MART. The working principle is assessed in terms of computational effort, reconstruction quality and velocity field accuracy with both synthetic time-resolved tomographic images of a turbulent boundary layer and two experimental databases documented in the literature. The first is the time-resolved data of flow past an airfoil trailing edge used in the study of Novara and Scarano (Exp Fluids 52:1027–1041, 2012); the second is a swirling jet in a water flow. In both cases, the effective elimination of ghost particles is demonstrated in number and intensity within a short temporal transient of 5–10 frames, depending on the seeding density. The increased value of the velocity space–time correlation coefficient demonstrates the increased velocity field accuracy of SMTE compared with MART.