title: Interface and permittivity simultaneous reconstruction in electrical capacitance tomography based on boundary and finite-elements coupling method.
abstract: Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a non-destructive detection technique for imaging the permittivity distributions inside an observed domain from the capacitances measurements on its boundary. Owing to its advantages of non-contact, non-radiation, high speed and low cost, ECT is promising in the measurements of many industrial or biological processes. However, in the practical industrial or biological systems, a deposit is normally seen in the inner wall of its pipe or vessel. As the actual region of interest (ROI) of ECT is surrounded by the deposit layer, the capacitance measurements become weakly sensitive to the permittivity perturbation occurring at the ROI. When there is a major permittivity difference between the deposit and the ROI, this kind of shielding effect is significant, and the permittivity reconstruction becomes challenging. To deal with the issue, an interface and permittivity simultaneous reconstruction approach is proposed. Both the permittivity at the ROI and the geometry of the deposit layer are recovered using the block coordinate descent method. The boundary and finite-elements coupling method is employed to improve the computational efficiency. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated with the simulation tests. This article is part of the themed issue 'Supersensing through industrial process tomography'.
authors.affiliation: Tianjin Key Laboratory of Process Measurement and Control, School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China.
authors.forename: Shangjie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: Tianjin Key Laboratory of Process Measurement and Control, School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China fdong@tju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Dong
keywords: block coordinate descent method; boundary and finite-elements coupling method; deposit layer detection; electrical capacitance tomography; interface and permittivity simultaneous reconstruction