Initial Study of Multiple Excitation Source for Electrical Resistance Tomography in Steel Pipe Application

Abstract

Tomography is a method of reconstructing the image of an object’s interest within the sensing zone. Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) system operates when using current as an excitation source and output voltage is measured at the detection electrode and the research will result in the changes of electric potential distribution. A lot of researches have been made using ERT to identify a liquid-gas regime in the steel pipe focused on improving image resolution of the regime. However, a common excitation source of ERT used only a single excitation. Thus, this research uses COMSOL Multiphysics as a platform for simulation of multiple excitations of electrical resistance tomography for liquid-gas regime identification in steel pipe. The analysis and performance of new simulation which applies multiple excitation sources have been compared with the single excitation. Besides, the project is limited to 54 mm inner diameter of a steel pipe. As a conclusion, 50% of the excitation source can increase the image resolution of those regimes especially in the middle of the steel pipe.