An analytical boundary element integral approach to track the boundary of a moving cavity using electrical impedance tomography

This paper is about locating the boundary of a moving cavity within a homogeneous background from the voltage measurements recorded on the outer boundary. An inverse boundary problem of a moving cavity is formulated by considering a two-phase vapor–liquid flow in a pipe. The conductivity of the flow components (vapor and liquid) is assumed to be constant and known a priori while the location and shape of the inclusion (vapor) are the unknowns to be estimated. The forward problem is solved using the boundary element method (BEM) with the integral equations solved analytically. A special situation is considered such that the cavity changes its location and shape during the time taken to acquire a full set of independent measurement data. The boundary of a cavity is assumed to be elliptic and is parameterized with Fourier series. The inverse problem is treated as a state estimation problem with the Fourier coefficients that represent the center and radii of the cavity as the unknowns to be estimated. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used as an inverse algorithm to estimate the time varying Fourier coefficients. Numerical experiments are shown to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Through the results, it can be noticed that the proposed BEM with EKF method is successful in estimating the boundary of a moving cavity.