Applications of electrical capacitance tomography in two phase flow visualization

Abstract

The successful application of Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) depends heavily on the image reconstruction speed and quality. The two requirements usually cannot be satisfied simultaneously. Also, for a large number of acquired 2D ECT images, a 3D presentation of them is much desired to track the variations of the material distribution in a third dimension. To facilitate ECT for practical flow analyses in process engineering, the authors have recently developed algorithms for 3D image presentation and for online iterative image reconstruction that only takes the same time as a linear back projection method but yields good image qualities as the Landweber iterative method does. The new methods have been successfully applied to visualize several classes of two phase flows, namely fluidization, cyclone separation, circulating rate determination in circulating fluidized beds, pneumatic conveying, rotating drum mixing. Special characteristics in each case have been discussed and valuable results are obtained, which are reported in this paper.