Evaluation of a limited angle scanned electron beam x-ray CT approach for two-phase pipe flows

Abstract

We investigated the imaging capability of a fast linearly scanned electron beam x-ray tomography approach with respect to the phase structure recovery for two-phase flows in a cylindrical pipe. As a consequence of the suggested linear electron beam deflection pattern we need to solve an inverse problem of the limited-angle type which introduces some artefacts in the reconstructed images. To reduce these artefacts we have devised a modified iterative image reconstruction algorithm denoted as binary ART including a level-set based image smoothing operation. To assess the achievable quality of spatial phase structure recovery from the limited-angle data we performed a simulation study on three-dimensional flow data sets obtained with a fast and high-resolution conductivity wire-mesh sensor under real two-phase flow conditions. The simulations revealed that the reconstruction error remains below 2% for up to 1% of Gaussian noise in the projection data and even for up to 5% noise in the case of bubble diameters below 3 mm.