Abstract
A desirable feature of an electrical capacitance tomography system is the adaptation possibility to any sensor configuration and measurement mode. A run-time reconfiguration of a system for electrical capacitance tomography is presented. An original mechanism is elaborated to reconfigure, on the fly, a modular EVT4 system with multiple FPGAs installed. The outlined system architecture is based on FPGA programmable logic devices (Xilinx Spartan) and PicoBlaze soft-core processors. Soft-core processors are used for communication, measurement control and data preprocessing. A novel method of FPGA partial reconfiguration is described, in which a PicoBlaze soft-core processor is used as a reconfiguration controller. Behavioral reconfiguration of the system is obtained by providing run-time access to the program code of a soft-core control processor. The tests using EVT4 hardware and different algorithms for tomographic scanning were performed. A test object was measured using 2D and 3D sensors. The time and resources required for the examined reconfiguration procedure are evaluated.
Highlights
Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is an imaging technique enabling the visualization of the spatial distribution of electric permittivity [1]
The second template contained an algorithm for a tomographic scan using a 3D sensor equipped with 32 electrodes spread over two rings (Figure 10b)
We showed the original application of run-time reconfiguration in a data acquisition system for ECT
Summary
Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is an imaging technique enabling the visualization of the spatial distribution of electric permittivity [1]. Due to the significant difference in electric permittivity of liquids and gases, ECT can be successfully applied to monitor dynamic processes in chemical and process engineering [2], such as a slurry flow, multi-phase flow [3,4], batch mixing, separation, combustion [5], etc. In ECT, a cross-sectional image is reconstructed using measurements of the mutual capacitance of electrodes surrounding the examined volume. The number of electrodes, i.e., spatial sampling, is limited due to the extremely low value of measured capacitances, which does not allow for decreasing the electrode area. The ECT weaknesses are low capacitance measurement sensitivity to a permittivity change and poor spatial resolution. Up to several thousand frames per second, the relatively simple design of the sensor and its scalability are ECT strengths
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