A High Speed Current Pulse Electrical Resistance Tomography System for Dynamic Process Monitoring

This paper describes an instrument for Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) measurements based on a current pulse technique which has been shown by the authors to be a viable and easily implemented alternative to conventional AC excited systems. This system enables data to be acquired and recorded at 1000 frames/second on a single plane 16 electrode system and every 50th frame to be reconstructed and displayed to provide a real time display. The high frame rate enables transient phenomena to be investigated. The design incorporates a multiplexor allowing 8 rings of 16 electrodes to be sampled sequentially and thus provide data sets from all planes at 125 frames/second. This data can be processed to provide 3-D reconstructions and for velocity measurements using cross-correlation techniques. The system is primarily intended for use in minerals processing applications and data is presented from electrode systems used in slurry pipeline monitoring. It is suggested that simplified design and low manufacturing cost of the current pulse ERT systems will open the way for wide scale industrial applications.