Electrical capacitance tomography for monitoring of pneumatic conveying processes

Pneumaticconveyingisafavourabletrans- port technique for particulate materials. Hereby the solid material is transported by means of a transport gas through the pipe system. Knowledge about flow param- eters is important for the optimization of the conveying process, e.g. with respect to the energy consumption. However, the nature of the process forms a challenging environment for flow measurements. Flow meters based on electrical sensing effects such as capacitive sensing are of particular interest because of their non-invasive nature. Yet the determination for flow parameters from the electrical signals is a challenging problem. Hereby process variations, e.g. due to different flow regimes, have to be considered. In this work we present electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) for the determination of flow parameters in pneumatic conveying. ECT is an imaging modality, which allows for the reconstruction of the spatial material distribution from capacitance mea- surements. We address the design of algorithms, which incorporate knowledge about flow processes and present experimental results obtained at a test rig for flow ex- periments.