Novel development of web accessible electrical capacitance tomography system on ILAB shared architecture

The Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) is imaging technique used for determining material distribution in the interior of an enclosed vessel by means of external capacitance measurements. In recent years, developments and advancements in technology have led to widespread use of ECT for industrial applications as a result ECT has become one of the main areas of research in many engineering colleges/universities. Most developed ECT systems exist as stand-alone systems based on conventional centralized measurement system design approach, which brings all components together into a single system hence forcing a user to be physically at the same location as the system; ECT as a research tool and as an industrial monitoring and control system, being stand-alone is undesirable; it should be sharable and remotely accessible. In this dissertation, a web accessible ECT system on iLab Shared Architecture (ISA) has been developed whereby any registered iLab user can access the system online. The ECT system components were distributed by separating the sensory unit (sensor and sensor electronics) from the reconstruction unit. Reconstruction unit using Linear Back Projection (LBP) algorithm was developed and put online through ISA and acts as the interface/door to the ECT system. Results show ECT images are being produced successfully online as they were previously produced locally hence showing that it is possible to have an ECT system with distributed implementation and remotely accessed online. Quality of images produced is poor due to the algorithm (LBP) used; this calls for more research on online ECT image reconstruction using more advanced algorithms.