A miniature electrical capacitance tomograph

The paper describes a miniature electrical capacitance tomography system. This is based on a custom CMOS silicon integrated circuit comprising eight channels of signal conditioning electronics to source drive signals and measure voltages. Electrodes are deposited around a hole that is fabricated, using ultrasonic drilling, through a ceramic substrate and has an average diameter of 0.75 mm. The custom chip is interfaced to a host computer via a bespoke data acquisition system based on a microcontroller, field programmable logic device and wide shift register. This provides fast capture of up to 750 frames of data prior to uploading to the host computer. Data capture rates of about 6000 frames per second have been achieved for the eight-electrode sensor. This rate could be increased but at the expense of signal to noise. Captured data are uploaded to a PC, via a RS232 interface, for off-line imaging. Initial tests are reported for the static case involving 200 µm diameter rods that are placed in the sensor and for the dynamic case using the dose from an inhaler.