An Image Construction Based on the VTLF Fusion Technique for Oil-Water Two-Phase Flow of Noncontact Electrical Impedance Tomography

Electrical tomography (ET) has attracted extensive attention in the petroleum multiphase flow field due to its advantages of nonintrusion, nonradiation, and simple equipment structure. Some contactless impedance imaging methods, such as capacitively coupled electrical resistance tomography (CCERT) and phase-based dielectric spectroscopy tomography, or displacement current phase tomography (DCPT), have been studied for the parameter measurement of two-phase flow. The mentioned research mainly focuses on the separate imaging by real part, imaginary part, or phase information of the voltage/current. However, the distribution change of media in the region of interest (RoI), especially the presence of high permittivity and conductivity materials, involves the distribution change of conductivity, permittivity, and loss factor. Developing a proper image fusion technique based on the three components can provide more comprehensive image information for tomographic imaging. This article proposed an improved logic filter image fusion algorithm based on a variable threshold (VTLF), and a noncontact electrical impedance tomography (NEIT) system for imaging water-oil two-phase flow is carried out. Image reconstruction is implemented by the VTLF image fusion algorithm under different media distributions, conductivities, and excitation frequencies, and the image fusion algorithms of a weighted average (WA) and logic filter (LF) are also used for comparison. The simulation results show that the reconstructed images by the proposed fusion method of VTLF had the lowest artifacts and the highest correlation coefficient (above 0.7) compared with other methods. Also, in the experiment, the VTLF also got the best performance, so it is effective to improve the reconstruction accuracy.