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Electrical Capacitance Tomography




Although capacitance sensing methods were in widespread use the idea of using capacitance measuremnet to form images is attributed to Maurice Beck and co-workers at UMIST in the 1980s .

Although usually called Tomography , the technique differs from conventional tomographic methods, in which high resolution images are formed of slices of a material. The measurement electrodes, which are metalic plates, must be sufficiently large to give a measureable change in capactiance. This measns that very few electrodes are used and eight or twelve electrodes is common. An N-eleectrode system can only provide N(N-1)/2 independent measurements. This means that the technique is limited to producing very low resolution images of approximate slices. However, ECT is fast, and relatively inexpensive.


REFERENCES

  • S M Huang, A Plaskowski, C G Xie and M S Beck, Capacitance-based tomographic flow imaging system, Electronics Letters, 24 (7), 1988, pp 418-419.

  • W Q Yang, Hardware design of electrical capacitance tomography systems, Meas. Sci. Technol., 7 (3), 1996, pp 225-232

  • M Soleimani, W R B Lionheart, Nonlinear image reconstruction in electrical capacitance tomography using experimental data, Meas. Sci. Technol., 16, 2005, pp 1987-1996

  • W Q Yang and L H Peng, Image reconstruction algorithms for electrical capacitance tomography, Meas. Sci. Technol., 14, 2003, pp R1-R13 (invited review article)