Role of tomography in gas/solids flow measurement

Gas/solids flow measurement presents many challenges to academics and engin eers. Although this subject has been investigated for many years, it still remains a notorious task. The main difficulty is that all existing multi-ph ase flow meters are flow-regime-dependent and suffer from severe non-linear ity problems. Industrial process tomography is based on measuring a subject , such as a gas/solids flow, from many different viewing angles and reconst ructing cross-sectional distributions, i.e. tomographic images. From the im ages the flow regime can be identified, the solids fraction and velocity pr ofiles be derived, and the volumetric flow rate be measured. This paper dis cusses these possibilities, in particular with electrical capacitance tomog raphy (ECT). Some new results are presented. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.