On the performance of a capacitively coupled electrical impedance tomography sensor with different configurations

Capacitively coupled electrical impedance tomography (CCEIT) is a new kind of electrical resistance tomography (ERT) which realizes contactless measurement by capacitive coupling and extends traditional resistance measurement to total impedance measurement. This work investigates the performance of a CCEIT sensor with three different configurations, including the unshielded configuration, the shielded configuration A (the CCEIT sensor with the external shield) and the shielded configuration B (the CCEIT sensor with both the external shield and the radial screens). The equivalent circuit models of the measurement electrode pair of the CCEIT sensor with different configurations were developed. Additionally, three CCEIT prototypes corresponding to the three configurations were developed. Both the simulation work and experiments were carried out to compare various aspects of the three CCEIT prototypes, including the sensitivity distribution, the impedance measurement and the practical imaging performance. Simulation results show that shielded configurations improve the overall average sensitivity of the sensitivity distributions. Shielded configuration A contributes to improve the uniformity of the sensitivity distributions, while shielded configuration B reduces the uniformity in most cases. Experimental results show that the shielded configurations have no significant influence on the imaging quality of the real part of impedance measurement, but do make sense in improving the imaging performance of the imaginary part and the amplitude of impedance measurement. However, configuration B (with radial screens) has no significant advantage over configuration A (without radial screens). This work provides an insight into how shielding measures influence the performance of the CCEIT sensor, in addition to playing an important role in shielding unwanted noise and disturbances. The research results can provide a useful reference for further development of CCEIT sensors.