Virtual instrument for electrical capacitance tomography

The development of a virtual instrument for Electrical Capacitance Tomography is presented. The main goal of this work is to simulate conventional sensor arrays, pipe lines shapes and flow patterns as dealt with by the Electrical Capacitance Tomography. In order to ease testing, to aid in the development of new ideas and process research in the area, the proposed instrument provides the users with the possibility to establish new sensor distribution configurations (different sensor and pipe line geometries) and to define flow patterns. This virtual instrument helps to determine the number of pixels, gray levels in the reconstructed tomography image and to calculate the error of the resulting image as well. The user can also interact with tomography aspects such as capacitance values or sensitivity maps between each pair of electrodes. This system represents a novel and reliable tool for researching multiphase flow measurements.