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The main factor limiting the performance of electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is an extremely low value of inter-electrode capacitances. The charge-discharge circuit is a well suited circuit for a small capacitance measurement due to its immunity to noise and stray capacitance, although it has a problem associated with a charge injected by the analogue switches, which results in a dc offset. This paper presents a new diode-based circuit for capacitance measurement in which a charge transfer method is realized without switches. The circuit was built and tested in one channel configuration with 16 multiplexed electrodes. The performance of the elaborated circuit and a comparison with a classic charge-discharge circuit are presented. The elaborated circuit can be used for sensors with inter-electrode capacitances not lower than 10 fF. The presented approach allows us to obtain a similar performance to the classic charge-discharge circuit, but has a simplified design. A lack of the need to synchronize the analogue switches in the transmitter and the receiver part of this circuit could be a desirable feature in the design of measurement systems integrated with electrodes.

A new method of capacitance measurement for electrical capacitance tomography is presented. A single-shot excitation is used to accelerate measurement. A high-voltage pulse and oversampling of received signal are applied to obtain an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio. The results of measurements of standard capacitors and mutual capacitance of electrodes in 16 electrode tomographic sensors are presented. The elaborated circuit is stray-immune. It can measure capacitance in a range from about 1 fF to 1 pF at one gain setting with good linearity and precision at the rate of 20 000 samples per second.

Image reconstruction in electrical capacitance tomography requires a solution of an ill-posed inverse problem with an unknown measuring model which can be estimated during a reconstruction process. This paper presents a new version of a nonlinear iterative reconstruction similar to the Levenberg method. Only a few updates of the Jacobian are performed in contrast to modification every step in nonlinear iterative algorithms. A specialized numerical procedure was applied to speed up calculation of a sensitivity matrix. A step length factor together with a regularization parameter was used. A constraint for an estimated permittivity value was introduced. The L-curve method was applied to estimate the value of the regularization parameter. A proposed algorithm was evaluated on real objects and their numerical representations. A 16 electrode tomograph was used for real data acquisition. The elaborated algorithm achieves good quality of reconstructed images with reduced computation time.

Electrical Capacitance Tomography is used to visualize a spatial distribution of electric permittivity in a tomographic sensor. ECT is able to create even thousands of frames per second which is suitable for application in the industry, e.g. monitoring of multiphase flows or material mixing. A tool for sensor modelling and image reconstruction is needed in order to develop improved solutions and to better understand phenomena in ECT. A software for 2D and 2D modelling is developed in the Division of Nuclear and Medical Electronics. In this paper a Matlab toolbox called ECTsim for 3D modelling is presented.

Further tests of EVT4 data acquisition system for electrical capacitance tomography are presented. The modular system, which can have up to 32 channels with an individual analogue to digital converter, was designed to ensure small uncertainty of capacitance measurement at high speed of imaging. The system’s performance in the context of 3D imaging was experimentally verified. In particular, we show that the measurement of changes in capacitance due to a small change of an electric permittivity distribution for the most distant electrodes in a suitably designed 3D sensor is possible using our system. Cross-plane measurements together with the measurements for the pairs of most distant electrodes are essential for accurate reconstruction of 3D distributions. Due to sensitivity of capacitance measurements obtained in the hardware, the measurements for all electrode pairs can be used in the inverse problem – the system of equations can be extended. Although the numerical condition number of a matrix of such a system is high, image reconstruction is possible from the data obtained in our system. The results of 3D image reconstruction for simple test objects are shown.