Theoretical simulation of the measurement process of electrical impedance tomography

Measuring the distribution of the density of slurry flow in a pipeline is a difficult task. This paper deals with the application of an electrical impedance tomography-based Measurement technique for measuring this density distribution. The objective of the simulation presented in the paper is to lay a basis for the development of a measurement method that is capable of an on-line measurement of the concentration and velocity distribution of solids hydraulically transported in a pipeline. The crucial part of the EIT instrument are; sensors, a data acquisition system (hardware) and an image reconstruction algorithm (software). The paper presents two software aspects that are important for a correct simulation of a physical quantity distribution from signals produced by the EIT-based measurement instrument. These aspects are the forward problem and the image-reconstruction problem. A standard FEM package ANSYS was used for testing the FEM program that was specially developed for the research work. The iterative modified Newton-Raphson method (MNR) was used as image reconstruction algorithm, and a program based on this method was developed. The objectives of the image reconstruction simulations are, testing of the image reconstruction program and, optimization. of the parameters.