Simplified Data Analysis for Electrical Resistance Tomography: Application to Hydrocyclones

Data acquired from a processing system using industrial-scale electrical resistance tomography (ERT) could provide valuable information on the operational performance of hydrocyclones. Tomography images of hydrocyclones, in general, are used to analyze operational parameters, but their analysis may not be fast enough to capture transient changes or provide clear phase boundaries between the object of interest and the medium. In such cases, one of the alternative approaches is to utilize least-squares modeling of the raw data to interpret transient changes, which is relatively faster and more efficient. In hindsight, this method may not be able to identify the location of the object of interest. In this paper, a new data analysis approach to estimate transient changes in the disturbance and a simplified conductivity matrix to estimate the location of the disturbance are considered. The conductivities measured across a cross-section were used to calculate the size of the disturbance. The disturbance’s position with respect to the cross-section was estimated using a simplified reconstruction of the conductivity matrix. In both cases, the same conductivity matrix was used. Several fundamental ERT experiments with different disturbance sizes were carried out to establish a suitable algorithm that could identify the disturbance. The analysis method presented in this paper can provide a basis to further explore an additional approach to analyze the performance of the hydrocyclone. The estimated radius of the disturbance was overlaid on an actual cross-section to infer the position with respect to the cross-section of the system. An attempt was also made to develop an empirical relationship that can estimate the effective size of the disturbance. The paper also discusses some implementation and practical challenges that need to be addressed for us to gain confidence in the proposed analysis method.