The use of simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique for electrical capacitance tomography

High-quality reconstruction of capacitance tomography data is important to get the quantitative information from the cross sectional images of the mul tiphase pipe flow. Due to the complex nature of the capacitance sensors, th e reconstruction algorithms well developed for medical tomography are not a pplicable. The main problems lie in two aspects. One is the 'soft-field' ef fect, the other is the limited number of measurements. To resolve these pro blems and get high-quality images, a reconstruction algorithm, named simult aneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT), often used in geology inv estigation, is introduced. According to the fastness of the process tomogra phy and the smoothing effect of SIRT, some improvements have been made. The se methods are compared to the well-known linear back projection algorithm (LBP) and the linear back projection thresholded algorithm widely used in c apacitance tomography. A computer simulated and real eight-electrode capaci tance tomography system has been used for the evaluation. (C)2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.