Research On Optimization Of Electrical Capacitance Tomography System

Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) is a PT technique based on thecapacitance sensing principle. ECT system has the advantages of low cost, beingnon-intrusive and fast in response. It is a prosperous PT technique in industrialapplication.Although ECT technique has achieved great progress in many fields in the recent20 years, and has promising applications in industrial processes, many basicresearches need also to be done in the further steps.The author focuses on the optimization and application investigation of ECTsystem. The following achievement has been obtained:1,The development of the real-time imaging software packageThe real-time imaging software package of ECT system based on VC++ has beendeveloped, which includes control software and reconstruction software. In thecontrol software, the characters of the hardware architecture have been consideredadequately while programming. The sensitivity matrix algorithm is adopted in thereconstruction section.2,A set of ECT system based on the electric-field imaging chip MC33794 is designedand developed successfully.3,The optimum design of array electrodeThe sensing field in ECT system is "soft-field", which is inhomogeneous andmainly relies on the structure parameter of array electrode. The effect of the structureparameters of array electrode on the uniformity of sensing field distribution isanalyzed, and the optimum design using the finite element method is made. A set ofoptimum parameters is obtained.4,Performance experiments on the systemA series of performance experiments have been done on the new-developed ECTsystem including static performance experiments and dynamic performanceexperiments.a) The static performance experiments include the spatial resolution test,experiments on different objects and typical static models of gas/liquidtwo-phase flow. The results showed that the obtained reconstructed imageswere quite clear.b) The dynamic performance test is mainly about the speed of the reconstructionimages. The result of speed test is about 20 frames per second.