An experimental study of electrical impedance tomography for the two-phase flow visualization

Numerical and experimental works are conducted to develop a visualization technique for the phase distribution in a two-phase flow field with electrical impedance tomography technique, which reconstructs the resistivity distribution with the electrical responses that are determined by corresponding excitations. The finite element method is employed to solve the electrical field induced by the currents through electrodes placed along the boundary and a regularized Newton-Raphson iterative method is used to determine the search step minimizing the error between the calculated and the measured voltages at the electrodes. With an apparatus developed for impedance imaging this study attempts to reconstruct the images of the simulated bubble distributions and the reconstructed images imply the potential possibility of the electrical impedance tomography for the two-phase flow visualization. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd.