International Society for Industrial Process Tomography

Performance Investigation of an Electromagnetic Flow Tomography System

J. C. Abrolat^*, T. Musch

Institute of Electronic Circuits,Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

^*Email: jan.abrolat@rub.de

ABSTRACT

The determination of volume flows with standard electromagnetic flow meters relies on the knowledge of the present flow configuration to obtain an accurate mean flow velocity. Here, changing flow conditions in the presence of valves, pipe bends, and multiphase flows impede a reliable measurement. To meet these challenges, electromagnetic flow tomography has been introduced to determine the flow velocity distribution in the pipe’s cross section. In this contribution the performance of a previously proposed electromagnetic flow tomography system is evaluated with respect to achievable spatial resolution and mean flow velocity error. Therefore, a method to determine the optimal excitation schemes for different flow velocity distributions is applied for a sensor prototype with twelve pairs of magnetic field coils and twelve electrodes. The obtained magnetic field configurations with varied number of field excitations are utilized in a computational model to evaluate the accuracy of two different reconstruction methods. Here, the Gauss-Newton method with Tikhonov regularization and the direct algebraic reconstruction method are implemented. Both reconstruction methods are consequently evaluated for various flow configurations. Special flow profiles are implemented for the determination of the achievable spatial resolutions and mean flow velocity errors. The findings of the numerical analysis are verified with experimental flow velocity measurements of the considered test scenarios utilizing the electromagnetic flow tomography prototype system.

Keywords electromagnetic flow tomography, flow meter, velocity profile

Industrial Application General