A Quantitative Ultrasonic Travel-Time Tomography to Investigate Liquid Elaborations in Industrial Processes

Abstract

This work presents an ultrasound tomography imaging system and method for quantitative mapping of the sound speed in liquid masses. It is highly desirable to be able to inspect vessel fluid mass distribution, notably in the chemical and food industrial operations. Optimization of industrial reactors has been crucial to the improvement of industrial processes. There is a great need to investigate how and if tomographic imaging sensors could aid the automatic control of these process tanks. Single-measurement ultrasound techniques and especially spectrometric methods have been a subject of study of industrial applications. Tomographic systems provide key multi-dimensional and spatial information when compared to the well-established single-channel measurement system. Recently, ultrasound tomography has attracted a great deal of interest in a wide spectrum of industrial applications. The system has been designed as 32 piezoelectric ring-array positioned in a 30 cm tank, with an excitation frequency of 40 kHz. Two-dimensional transmission travel-time tomography was developed to reconstruct the fluid mass distributions. Prior experiments are mainly based on inclusions of a few centimetres and on a liquid solution of different concentrations. They have been conducted to test the spatial and quantitative resolution of the ultrasound imaging device. Analysing the reconstructed images, it is possible to provide accurate spatial resolution with low position errors. The system also demonstrated inclusion movement with a temporal resolution of 4 frames per second (fps) in dynamical imaging sense. Sound velocity quantitative imaging was developed for the investigation of ultrasonic propagation in different liquids. This work, for the first time, shows how quantitative sound velocity imaging using transmission mode time of flight data could be used to characterize liquid density distribution of industrial reactors. The results suggest that ultrasound tomography can be used to quantitatively monitor important process parameters.

Dual Modality EIT-UTT for Water Dominate Three-Phase Material Imaging

“…By enveloping the received signals and detecting the waveform's point of maximum peak of amplitude, one can figure out the time that took to the biggest transmitted pulse to travel through the ray-path. Using the raw TOF data to compute sound-speed data, we conclude by getting the average sound velocity of each one of the wave-rays [34].…”

“…These weighting values have been computed by an algorithm which checks the distance of the ray to the centre of the pixel. By treating the pixel as a circle, we achieved to reduce dramatically the computation costs of the process of assigning thee values [34].…”

nfluence of Measuring Points in Ultrasonic Tests on the Tomographic Image Quality of Concrete

“…Ultrasonic tomography is an NDT method that allows the mapping of the entire internal section of the object from its projections of ultrasonic waves. In contrasting with traditional ultrasonic single measurement techniques, tomographic ultrasound technique provides methods of sampling a substantial volume rather than a single point, with an automated way of data collection and processing [KOU19]. It provides visualization, either by the cross section or by the three-dimensional structure.…”

“…In the industrial field, a study demonstrated the effectiveness of an online sound speed travel-time ultrasound computed tomography system to inspect liquid mixtures of different densities. The study shows the soundspeed tomographic imaging to monitor liquid elaboration processes [KOU19]. In the biological field, the development of multi-spectral optoacoustic tomography techniques was proposed by [MER19] for whole-body computed tomography of mice, in a devised a hybrid transmission-reflection optoacoustic ultrasound (TRO-PUS) imaging platform.…”

Quantitative Evaluations with 2D Electrical Resistance Tomography in the Low Conductivity Solutions Using 3D Printed Phantoms for Crystallization Process Monitoring

“…Many imaging techniques for the morphology evaluation of crystals use microscopic samples in the offline-system for particle characterization [9]. However, online PAT imaging techniques such as ECT [10][11][12][13] and ultrasound tomography [14,15] have proved to be very useful tomographic techniques to visualize the fluids and dense phases or separate the solutions depending on concentrations.…”