An Ultrasonic Transmission/Reflection Tomography System for Industrial Multiphase Flow Imaging

Abstract

Monitoring multiphase flow process and measuring its parameters have been a research topic that received broad attentions for the past decades. Ultrasonic process tomography (UPT) obtains the distribution of the two-phase flow based on ultrasound propagation in different fluids, making it valuable to the industrial monitoring and measurement. UPT can nonintrusively explore transient hydrodynamics of the multiphase flow, but the reconstruction quality of single modality is always dependent on phase distribution. In this paper, a dual-mode UPT that fuses the attenuation and time-of-flight of ultrasound is presented. To implement this scheme, a digital dual-mode UPT system that works under both the transmission-mode and reflection-mode is designed. A 16-channel ultrasound data acquisition system is proposed, which is flexibly programmable and reconfigurable through an field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The system includes a series of functional modules, and is based on the compact peripheral component interconnect bus for real-time data transmission to meet industrial field requirements. Static experiments show that the system can distinguish the interface of the different inclusions and preferably reconstruct the position and area of the inclusions through fusing the transmission and reflection reconstruction, the relative error and correlation coefficient of the reconstructed images are presented, respectively, which show preferable and stable distinguishability of different inclusions.