Location of bed interface in settling slurry pipe flow using ert

Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) is a non-invasive technique that can be used to monitor settling slurry pipe flow. Two aspects of the imaging were investigated. Of initial interest was the selection of an appropriate image reconstruction algorithm. Using the EIDORS open-source tool set, various image reconstruction algorithms were evaluated and results indicate the best performing was a combination of the Laplace and GREIT algorithms. Next, a novel functional measure was developed, using auto-correlations of image pixel waveforms, to detect the interface of the settled bed. The results of this analysis appear to show a zone of instability corresponding to the bed/supernatant interface at different flow rates, suggesting a promising way of extracting additional useful information from the ERT measurements