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The measurement of a three-component (3C) velocity field in microfluidic devices with conventional techniques and conventional micro-PIV (particle image velocimetry) is still difficult due to limited optical access. Since Santiago et al (1998 Exp. Fluids 25 316-9), micro-PIV flow velocity measurements have remained mainly limited to 2C velocity vector field realizations. In this study, the third component of the velocity, i.e. out-of-plane velocity extraction from two-dimensional time-resolved (TR) micro-PIV images, is proposed. The method is based on PIV and performs cross-correlation (CC) peak height tracking inside the small ensembles of the TR-PIV flow images. This concept was verified basically by an experiment performed on a microscale fluid flow inside a 100 µm diameter inclined micro tube. Despite the inevitable background noise which affects the measurement negatively, the extracted steady-state depthwise velocity profile was in agreement with the analytical result.

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