Development of a New Method of Sensitivity Matrix for Image Reconstruction in Electric Charge Tomography System Using Finite Element Method

In this paper, a new method of sensitivity matrix generation is presented for application in electric charge tomography system. The sensitivity matrix is the most important parameter in solid particles concentration profile computation in electric charge tomography system. The analytical method of developing the sensitivity matrix that have been developed and used in electric charge tomography is characterised by some uncertainties that give poor tomography images of flowing solid particles. The new proposed method involved subdivision of the pipeline cross-section into many subdivisions called the computational mesh. The subdivision is made by the application of the Finite Element Method (FEM). On each of the electrodynamic sensor installed to detect the electric charges carried by the moving solid particles; the effect of the particles’ electric charges enclosed in each of the computational mesh is modelled into a system equation. The system equation is used to compute the effect of the charges in the form of a matrix system of size [M×N] called the sensitivity matrix. The sensitivity matrix is applied for the reconstruction of the tomography image, using the Linear Back Projection (LBP) method. The reconstructed images represented the solid particles distribution through the pipeline. This assertion is due the consistencies between the simulation and real images with respect to the simulated images and the captured real data.