A Limited Region Electrical Capacitance Tomography for Detection of Deposits in Pipelines

Abstract

Pipeline deposit is a worldwide problem facing the process industry affecting all phases of production, transmission, and distribution causing problems to the pipeline operations up to the customer delivery point. Therefore, monitoring the propagation of such deposits at different points of the pipeline network will help taking more adequate preventive actions. Several good technologies are available in the market nowadays for monitoring deposits but electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) technique in particular promises superior advantages as it is considered fast, compact, safe, easy to interpret, and cost effective. However, ECT still suffers from one disadvantage being the poor resolution, and thus, this paper suggests the use of ECT with limited region tomographic image reconstruction using a narrowbandpass filter to enhance the resolution of the produced images. The experimental results showed that different deposit regimes and fine deposits could be detected with high definition and high resolution.