A novel optical fibre process tomography structure for industry process control

Abstract

In this paper, we develop novel pixel distribution and plane-light-path structures for optical fibre process tomography, which can be used to measure medium distributions and contents in a circular cross section of cylindrical space in the field of industry process monitoring and control. Such structures partition the circular region into two parts: one is a ring-measured part including 60 pixels; the other is a centre unmeasured part corresponding to a mechanical supporting pole. Eight optical fibre sensor units are uniformly distributed around the circle, each consisting of six transmission fibres. A simple numerical model of stratified two-phase flow is employed to provide the projected data for image reconstruction and verify the feasibility of the novel structures. Reconstructed images are obtained in the presence of an algebraic iterative reconstruction algorithm, and they are basically in accordance with the original models. Theoretical image-reconstructed relative resolution, taking into account the 60 pixels, is 1.67%. However, we found that the reconstructed error is less than 5%.