Electrical process tomography: seeing “without eyes” inside stirred vessels

Body-scanning exploiting 3-D imaging has revolutionised diagnostics and treatment in medicine. Process engineers would like to be similarly able to image chemical process units in 3-D, but without the £multi-million price tag. UMIST and Leeds University have together, through the Virtual Centre for Industrial Process Tomography (http://www.vcipt.org), pioneered several electrical process tomography techniques and used them in a variety of applications. Illustrations are presented to show how electrical resistance tomography (ERT) has been developed for typical stirred vessels widely encountered in batch process manufacturing. The technique is potentially fast and inexpensive and capable of imaging both dynamic and pseudo-stationary processes. Examples from UMIST's two-tonne vessel will be presented for miscible tracer mixing, as well as gas-liquid and solid-liquid mixing.