Experimental research on two-phase flow visualization using a low-energy gamma CT system with sparse projections

This paper describes the application of a low-energy γ-ray computed tomography (CT) system to two-phase pipe flow measurement. Because this γ-ray CT system offers only three to nine projections, and the detector elements are sparsely arranged, the conventional reconstruction algorithms basically cannot meet the accuracy requirement, thus improvement based on the matrix completion method has been developed to improve the spatial resolution. Reconstructed results from limited measurement data of several typical flow regimes demonstrate the feasibility of this CT system. Comparisons between the proposed method and three other reconstruction algorithms show that the former has improved the spatial resolution with acceptable reconstruction speed.