Electrical capacitance tomography digital processing platform (ECT-DPU)

A reconfigurable computing architecture based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology is implemented for the Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) system. The ECT system is used to image the multi-phase flow when gas/liquid or solid/liquid phases occurs. In the ECT systems, an exhaustive computational image reconstruction algorithm has to vastly processed large amount of data. The software algorithms and hardware parameters are adjusted based on a Hardware-software codesign process using commercially available tools. The hardware system consists of capacitive sensors, wireless nodes and FPGA module. Rr4wesults show that implementing the ECT image reconstruction algorithm on the FPGA platform achives fast performance and small design density.