2D MODELLING OF A SENSOR FOR ELECTRICAL CAPACITANCE TOMOGRAPHY IN ECTSIM TOOLBOX

Abstract

Electrical capacitance tomography is used to visualize a spatial distribution of dielectrical permittivity of materials placed in a tomographic sensor. An image is reconstructed from measurements of mutual capacitances of electrodes placed around the examined volume. This technique is characterized by very high temporal resolution – it is possible to achieve even few thousands of images per second. One of drawbacks of the method is low spatial resolution. Electrical capacitance tomography is mainly used in industry, e.g. for multiphase flow visualization. One of important elements of a tomographic system is a sensor which parameters influence quality of measurements and therefore affects quality of reconstructed images. In the Division of Nuclear and Medical Electronics a Matlab toolbox called ECTsim was developed. It is used for modelling of sensors, simulations of electrical field and image reconstruction. In this article we present the latest improvement which is modelling of a sensor using algebra of sets. Using primitive elements like rectangle and sector of a ring it is possible to perform operations like union, intersection and difference of two elements with a designed language. With such tools it is easy to prepare complex models of tomographic sensors which have different geometries. In this paper we show two models of sensors with different geometry in order to show how ECTsim solves forward problem.

Keywords

• electrical capacitance tomography
• 2D modelling
• algebra of sets