Enhancement of Measurement Efficiency for

This paper presents a new sensing method to improve the efficiency of electrical capacitance tomography. Instead of applying one excitation signal to one electrode at a time, the multiple excitation capacitance polling (MECaP) method progres- sively applies an increasing number of multiple excitations to multiple electrodes and simultaneously measures the capacitance values, thereby significantly increasing the image scanning speed. The performance of a MECaP-based sensor system is numeri- cally simulated and analyzed using the finite element method. Experimental evaluation of the numerical results demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the new sensing technique and its applicability to a broad range of commercial and industrial ap- plications where permittivity determination through capacitance measurement provides an effective means for noninvasive dynamic processes monitoring in an enclosed environment.