Active monitoring apparatus for underground pollutant detection based on electrical impedance tomography

Spills and leaking of solvents widely used in many industrial processes have contaminated the environment at many highly industrialized sites and nearby areas. Site assessment and monitoring during remediation of soils and groundwater affected by this kind of contamination is often difficult and expensive. Geophysical techniques based on mapping a physical property of soil can be a useful tool for a rapid and fairly economic monitoring during site assessment and, even better, during the remediation process. Among these, electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is an attractive example of inverse problem as a technique for non-invasive diagnosis of conductive materials. This paper, after a brief description of the tomographic inversion process, describes the architecture, the design specifications of the measuring system for 2D and 3D resistive EIT.