Research On Excitation/measurement Strategy Of Tuber Electrical Resistance Tomography Monitoring System

Electrical Resistance Tomography-ERT is an important branch of Electrical Tomography. It attracts wide attentions of scholars from home and abroad by its outstanding advantages like no radiation, non-invasive, high performance price ratio. ERT technology has gradually applied in areas like multiphase flow measurement in industry electric agriculture and medical science. Now it has become a hot spot of research.It is attempted to monitor the state and get the online growing information of crop roots growing in farmland by extending the ERT technology to agriculture field. This could provide powerful device and method for the development of intensive agriculture and crop breeding.The electrical tomography system applied in multiphase flow measurement pay more attention to the phase holdup of the flow in pipeline and velocity of imaging ratio; While for the ERT system applied in plant toot monitoring, the resolution of imaging is emphasized, that means the accurate measurement of the position and size of tuber in soil is required. In order to achieve it, the optimization design in both excitation/measurement part and imaging algorithm of the system is needed. This paper mainly aims to study the excitation/measurement strategy for tuber monitoring ERT system. The excitation/measurement property is studied and the shape and size of the array electrode is optimized, which could provide guide for hardware reality and imaging algorithm optimization.Simulation experiment is conducted in paper through the models built by FEM software COMSOL multiphysics. The excitation/measurement property of array electrode in different shape and size is studied by the multilayer16-electrode model. The adjacent mode and opposite mode is discussed; the common rules of the measurement voltage in adjacent mode is studied; the influence brought from the electrode shape and size on axial/radial sensitivity of the rectangle array electrode is studied; optimization design and manufacture of electrode is completed.The innovation and contribution of the paper is as following:3D multi-physics model is built by FEM software COMSOL multiphgysics. The influence on boundary measuring voltage brought from the change of conductivity in field is comprehensively studied. Optimization of electrode for tuber ERT system and excitation/measurement strategy study is conducted. These could provide powerful support and guide for the further study in tuber monitoring system.