Applications of electric capacitance tomography in two-phase flow visualization

The application of electric capacitance tomography (ECT) depends on the image reconstruction speed and quality. The two requirements usually cannot be satisfied simultaneously. 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 algorithms for 3D image presentation and online iterative image reconstruction were developed as a linear back projection method but yields good image qualities as the Landweber iterative method does. The proposed method has been applied to visualize several classes of two-phase flow, namely fluidization, cyclone separation, circulating rate estimation in circulating fluidized beds, pneumatic conveying and rotating drum mixing. The special characteristics in each case are discussed.