Gas-liquid and miscible liquid mixing in a plant-scale vessel monitored using electrical resistance tomography

A large-scale electrical tomography system has been designed and set-up at UMIST to study imperfect mixing and improve the design of stirred vessels a nd their impeller configuration at plant-scale. The sensing system was cons tructed with 8-planes of sensing rings, each containing 16-electrodes and i nstalled into a 2.7 m(3) polypropylene vessel fitted with a standard Rushto n turbine. Images were reconstructed using the sensitivity theorem algorith ms. Some illustrative results for pseudo-stationary gas-liquid mixing and u nsteady semi-batch mixing of miscible fluids are reported. Issues related t o qualitative and quantitative reconstruction in 2-D and 3-D are discussed.