Abstract Due to the fact that a water entry cavity directly affects the hydrodynamic characteristics of underwater vehicles, its monitoring is crucial for controlling the motion stability of the vehicles. However, there is limited research on the visualization and measurement of cavities during vehicle motion. Based on Open-Electrical Capacitance Tomography (OECT), this article presents an image reconstruction method to measure the water entry cavity by combining field transformation and group-based sparse representation (FT-GSR). To address the openness of the cavity measurement domain, a field transformation method is proposed that unifies open- and closed-domain image reconstruction while reducing the dimensionality of the unknowns to be resolved and the computational complexity of the forward problem. To achieve high-resolution reconstruction, a group-based sparse representation method is proposed that utilizes global sparsity and neighborhood self-similarity in the reconstructed image, which shows good performance in simulation. Finally, water entry experiments were conducted to validate the performacne of the proposed method. Images captured by a high-speed camera were used as references to assess the accuracy of the calculated equivalent cavity diameter. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can outperform typical reconstruction methods while maintaining computational cost. Based on the aforementioned performance, the proposed method is anticipated to be integrated into system-on-chip technology to enable real-time, high-precision monitoring of the water entry cavity.
Read full abstract