Electronic hardware design of electrical capacitance tomography systems

Electrical tomography techniques for process imaging are very prominent for industrial applications, such as the oil and gas industry and chemical refineries, owing to their ability to provide the flow regime of a flowing fluid within a relatively high throughput. Among the various techniques, elect...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences physical, and engineering sciences, 2016-06, Vol.374 (2070), p.1-15
Main Authors: Saied, I., Meribout, M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amplifiers
Capacitance
Data acquisition
Electric potential
Electrodes
Emission computed tomography
Image reconstruction
Materials processing
Sensors
Tomography
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Summary:Electrical tomography techniques for process imaging are very prominent for industrial applications, such as the oil and gas industry and chemical refineries, owing to their ability to provide the flow regime of a flowing fluid within a relatively high throughput. Among the various techniques, electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is gaining popularity due to its non-invasive nature and its capability to differentiate between different phases based on their permittivity distribution. In recent years, several hardware designs have been provided for ECT systems that have improved its resolution of measurements to be around attofarads (aF, 10–18 F), or the number of channels, that is required to be large for some applications that require a significant amount of data. In terms of image acquisition time, some recent systems could achieve a throughput of a few hundred frames per second, while data processing time could be achieved in only a few milliseconds per frame. This paper outlines the concept and main features of the most recent front-end and back-end electronic circuits dedicated for ECT systems. In this paper, multiple-excitation capacitance polling, a front-end electronic technique, shows promising results for ECT systems to acquire fast data acquisition speeds. A highly parallel fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) based architecture for a fast reconstruction algorithm is also described. This article is part of the themed issue 'Supersensing through industrial process tomography'.
ISSN:1364-503X