Abstract
Conventional electrical resistance tomography (ERT) sensors suffer from the fringe effect, i.e., severe distortion of the electric field on both ends of the measurement electrodes, leading to a 3D sensing region for a 2D sensor. As a result, the objects outside an ERT sensor plane affect the sensing and hence image, i.e., deteriorating the image quality. To address this issue, a multiple-plane ERT sensor scheme is proposed in this paper. With this scheme, auxiliary sensor planes are used to provide references for the fringe effect of the measurement plane, for compensation by subtracting the weighed influence of the fringe effect. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme, either three-plane or two-plane sensor, can compensate for the fringe effect induced by objects outside the measurement plane with a variety of axial object distributions, i.e., several non-conductive bars or conductive bars placed at different cross-sectional and axial positions inside the sensor. Experiments were carried out. Images obtained with single-plane and multiple-plane ERT sensors are compared, and the proposed compensation scheme has been hence verified.
Highlights
Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) is an imaging technique used to visualize and measure the distribution of object(s) or material with different electrical properties within an imaging plane or volume of interest using a multi-electrode sensor
This paper presents a new approach to compensating for the fringe effect of ERT sensors
A three-plane ERT sensor scheme was proposed by Sun and Yang to compensate for fringe effect [8]
Summary
Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) is an imaging technique used to visualize and measure the distribution of object(s) or material with different electrical properties within an imaging plane or volume of interest using a multi-electrode sensor. To interrogate an imaging area of interest, an AC current is applied to one pair of electrodes sequentially while other electrodes are floating, and the inter-electrode resistance is measured This process continues until a complete set of data is taken. When an object of a certain length moves away from the electrode plane, the position of the reconstructed object approaches to the center of the sensor, due to the larger distortion of fringe fields in the distant location. One or two auxiliary electrode planes adjacent to the measurement electrode plane is/are used to sense the fringe effect induced by objects outside the measurement plane This is a multi-plane ERT sensor scheme. The influence of the proposed method on imaging of objects inside the measurement plane are demonstrated, showing that over-estimation of the size of objects can be alleviated by linear image reconstruction methods, in particular the Landweber iteration
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