Development of reconfigurable multi-electrode excitation scheme for electrical capacitance tomography system using LABVIEW FPGA

The Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) systems developed so far have been designed for specific applications with fixed electrode specifications and configurations. A new system is often required whenever changing to other applications or configurations because the electronics to control the excitation scheme is also fixed. As a research tool this inflexibility is limiting reconfiguration to ECT system (electronics control) as desirable. Flexible electronics control for multi-electrode excitation could be achieved by using reconfigurable hardware using FPGA technology. In this work LabVIEW FPGA was evaluated and implemented using NI SbRIO system to achieve the desirable flexibility for an 8-electrode ECT system. An 8-electrode ECT system was reconfigured into a 4-electrode ECT system; in which two electrodes were grouped together to act as single electrode. The two electrodes were selected as a source while others kept at ground potential. The results obtained from this dissertation show that the ECT sensor can be configured with more than one electrode excitation scheme. In this dissertation two electrode excitation schemes (single electrode excitation and double electrode excitation) were designed and tested. These configurations will make the ECT system more flexible and there will be no need of buying new hardware when users need to shift from one electrode configuration to another, hence cost effective.