Effect of pipeline thickness on electrical capacitance tomography

For the purpose of analyzing the effect of pipeline thickness on ECT system include sensor and image reconstruction, radius-electrode ratio is defined as the ratio of inner and outer radius of pipeline. The rules of 8-electrode sensor parameters such as capacitance, capacitance change, and change rate of capacitance and sensitivity map are discussed by ANSYS and Matlab, which are combined to simulate sensor characteristic. With the increase of radius-electrode ratio, capacitance sensitivity to inner media increases, and the effect of pipeline thickness on capacitances of four typical inter-electrode pairs is much different under the same inner radius. LBP algorithm is adopted to reconstruct the ECT images of stratified flow, core flow and annular flow with different radius-electrode ratios. Simulation results show that image error under high radius-electrode ratio is small, and the image reconstructed from stratified flow is better than the ones from core flow and annular flow, especially in the condition of low radius-electrode ratio. As a result, ECT with low radius-electrode ratio is benefit to image reconstruction.