3D temperature field reconstruction using ultrasound sensing system

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3D temperature field reconstruction is of practical interest to the power, transportation and aviation industries and it also opens up opportunities for real time control or optimization of high temperature fluid or combustion process. In our paper, a new distributed optical fiber sensing system consisting of a series of elements will be used to generate and receive acoustic signals. This system is the first active temperature field sensing system that features the advantages of the optical fiber sensors (distributed sensing capability) and the acoustic sensors (non-contact measurement). Signals along multiple paths will be measured simultaneously enabled by a code division multiple access (CDMA) technique. Then a proposed Gaussian Radial Basis Functions (GRBF)-based approach can approximate the temperature field as a finite summation of space-dependent basis functions and time-dependent coefficients. The travel time of the acoustic signals depends on the temperature of the media. On this basis, the Gaussian functions are integrated along a number of paths which are determined by the number and distribution of sensors. The inversion problem to estimate the unknown parameters of the Gaussian functions can be solved with the measured times-of-flight (ToF) of acoustic waves and the length of propagation paths using the recursive least square method (RLS). The simulation results show an approximation error less than 2% in 2D and 5% in 3D respectively. It demonstrates the availability and efficiency of our proposed 3D temperature field reconstruction mechanism.