Electrical resistance tomography sensor simulations: comparison with experiments

Abstract

This paper compares experimental results (differences of potential), obtained with a 16-electrode electrical resistance tomography (ERT) device using the adjacent-electrode pair measurement strategy, with finite-element method (FEM) simulations in two and three dimensions. In the first part of the paper, ERT measurements made on a homogeneous medium are compared with two- and three-dimensional FEM simulations. It is shown that the dependence of the electrical field on the axial coordinate cannot be neglected. Consequently, only the three-dimensional FEM simulations are able to fit the experimental results. In the second part of the paper, ERT measurements on static physical phantoms immersed in water evidence that ERT is significantly more sensitive to non-symmetrical distributions than to symmetrical ones. This observation is confirmed by three-dimensional FEM simulations performed on numerical phantoms that mimic the physical ones. In the last part of the paper, an attempt to use three-dimensional simulations to determine the characteristics (diameter and gas content) of a gas core created by injecting a gas flow from a single-orifice gas sparger leads to promising results.

Three-dimensional analysis on resistance tomography sensors and its application in inspection of milk flow

“…E Fransolet et al has carried out different simulation test on 3D division. The test shows that the simulation results even approximate the practical measurements in relation to 2D simulation results with the addition of nodes [6].…”

“…The distribution laws of the current in the pipe are complex with many unknown factors and the data is difficult to be dealt with, thus it must be cause errors if practical 3D field potential is analysis approximately with a simply 2D field. Thus, 3D simulation is very important [5], [6].In this paper, the authors deeply study the influences of sizes of electrodes on the distribution of sensing field by 3D simulation of ERT sensitivity field with software COMSOL and MATLAB7.0, then design two kinds of ERT sensors of pointed electrode array and rectangular-shaped electrode array according to the simulation results and finally carry out comparison test during the measurement of milk flows.…”

Quantitative Evaluations with 2d Electrical Resistance Tomography in the Low-Conductivity Solutions Using 3d-Printed Phantoms and Sucrose Crystal Agglomerate Assessments

“…Also, the entire batch reactor models were simulated to interpret the process progression [ 45 ]. Together with sensor simulations, the comparisons with experiments were performed [ 46 ] to observe the voltage changes. The studies involving quantitative inverse modeling for the cylindrical object using various FEM meshes [ 47 ] and improvement of sensitivity matrix for ERT [ 48 ] and ECT [ 49 ] showed interdependence of model design and accuracy of the estimations.…”

Quantitative Evaluations with 2D Electrical Resistance Tomography in the Low Conductivity Solutions Using 3D Printed Phantoms for Crystallization Process Monitoring

“…Some works in this direction are briefly mentioned here. Previous experiments by [46] compared ERT simulations with experiments with phantoms with diameter 2 cm in a tank with diameter 2.4 m by measuring the differential voltages. The regularization parameters were varied in [58] to evaluate and improve the spatial resolution in separating the simulated phantom objects of different shapes.…”