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Abstract Due to the ‘soft-field’ effect and the challenges posed by ill-posed and ill-conditioned inverse problems, it is difficult to obtain high quality images from an electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) system. To achieve both high-quality images and fast imaging speed with limited measurement data, an image reconstruction algorithm, which was initially proposed for compressive sensing, is adapted for ECT image reconstruction to optimize the ill-posed nature of its inverse problem. The proposed algorithm leverages deep learning networks inspired by the iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (ISTA), thereby creating a model that is both mathematically interpretable and endowed with trainable parameters. Building upon this foundation, the conventional Landweber iteration is integrated with the ISTA-Net to refine the optimization process for ECT image reconstruction. In order to propose an effective model adapting to the actual multiphase flow characteristics and complex flow pattern changes, the training and test process is driven by a comprehensive dataset generated from dynamic simulations, rather than artificial samples of multiphase distributions. This numerical methodology simulates the dynamic measurement process of a virtual ECT sensor by coupling the gas–liquid two-phase flow field and the ECT electrostatic field. The results of the testing phase indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional ECT image reconstruction methods. Compared with the linear back projection algorithm, the average image error and gas fraction error have been reduced by 20.44% and 16.74%, respectively, while maintaining a computational speed comparable to that of the Landweber iteration. The accuracy of the new algorithm in reconstructing the two-phase interface and estimating the gas fraction has been validated by static experimental tests, showing its potential for practical application in online gas–liquid two-phase flow measurement scenarios.
Xu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.