Enhancement of Measurement Efficiency for Electrical Capacitance Tomography

This paper presents a new sensing method to improve the efficiency of electrical capacitance tomography. Instead of applying one excitation signal to one electrode at a time, the multiple excitation capacitance polling (MECaP) method progressively applies an increasing number of multiple excitations to multiple electrodes and simultaneously measures the capacitance values, thereby significantly increasing the image scanning speed. The performance of a MECaP-based sensor system is numerically simulated and analyzed using the finite element method. Experimental evaluation of the numerical results demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the new sensing technique and its applicability to a broad range of commercial and industrial applications where permittivity determination through capacitance measurement provides an effective means for noninvasive dynamic processes monitoring in an enclosed environment.