A configurable electrical capacitance tomography system using a combining electrode strategy

Systematic investigation of a combining electrode strategy for electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is carried out. A configurable digital and analogue mixed ECT system using a combining electrode strategy is presented. Compared to the traditional ECT system, the presented system can be configured flexibly as the traditional ECT sensor mode and the combining electrode mode by connecting a number of electrodes as a combined electrode. In particular, the combining electrode mode is increasing the number of capacitance measurement data and the amelioration of sensitivity distribution. An image reconstruction framework is proposed by configuring the presented ECT system as the corresponding sensor mode adaptive to the permittivity distribution to be reconstructed, which includes the traditional ECT sensor mode, the symmetric combining electrode mode, the asymmetric combining electrode mode and the mixed combining electrode mode. Both simulation and experimental results show that image reconstructions with better quality and robustness to measurement noise can be obtained under the proposed adaptive image reconstruction framework by using the presented configurable ECT system.