An Improved Normalisation Approach for Electrical Capacitance Tomography

An electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) system is calibrated at the upper and lower values of permittivity. The measured capacitances are usually normalised and then used for image reconstruction. The conventional normalisation approach assumes that the distribution of the materials is in parallel and hence the normalised capacitance is a linear function of the measured capacitance. This approach is not appropriate in most situations. In this paper an alternative normalisation approach is derived from a series sensor model. Preliminary experimental results show that the quality of reconstructed images can be improved with the new normalisation approach for the situations tested.