Investigation of Spatial Resolution of Electrical Capacitance Tomography Based on Coupling Simulation

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) has been developed for imaging permittivity distribution of two-phase flows in a pipe or vessel with high temporal resolution. The spatial resolution of ECT is relatively low due to its soft-field, ill-posed, and ill-conditioned nature. So far, there is no comprehensive analysis of the spatial resolution of ECT for complex two-phase flows. To assess the merits of ECT systematically, 2-D modeling is carried out based on fluid-field and electrostatic-field coupling simulation for liquid–solids two-phase flows. The real permittivity distribution and the corresponding capacitance measurements can be obtained simultaneously. The effect of the number of electrodes, the mesh used for reconstruction, and the initialization method for the Landweber iteration algorithm on image quality are investigated. In terms of the correlation coefficient between the reconstructed permittivity distribution and the real permittivity distribution obtained from the coupling simulation model, the accuracy and the stability of reconstructed images are quantitatively evaluated. Furthermore, the sensitivity matrices and point spread functions calculated without capacitance measurements are used to compare the performance of ECT sensors and validate the results with capacitance measurements from the coupling simulation. The two methods, with and without capacitance measurements, are used to evaluate the change in spatial resolution of ECT with a different number of electrodes.