Electrical resistance tomography sensor simulations: comparison with experiments

This paper compares experimental results (differences of potential), obtained with a 16-electrode electrical resistance tomography (ERT) device using the adjacent-electrode pair measurement strategy, with finite-element method (FEM) simulations in two and three dimensions. In the first part of the paper, ERT measurements made on a homogeneous medium are compared with two- and three-dimensional FEM simulations. It is shown that the dependence of the electrical field on the axial coordinate cannot be neglected. Consequently, only the three-dimensional FEM simulations are able to fit the experimental results. In the second part of the paper, ERT measurements on static physical phantoms immersed in water evidence that ERT is significantly more sensitive to non-symmetrical distributions than to symmetrical ones. This observation is confirmed by three-dimensional FEM simulations performed on numerical phantoms that mimic the physical ones. In the last part of the paper, an attempt to use three-dimensional simulations to determine the characteristics (diameter and gas content) of a gas core created by injecting a gas flow from a single-orifice gas sparger leads to promising results.