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As one of the tomographic imaging techniques, electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is widely used in many industrial applications. While most ECT sensors have electrodes placed around a cylindrical chamber, the planar ECT sensor has been investigated for depth and defect detection. However, the planar ECT sensor has limited height and depth sensing capability due to its single-sided assessment with the use of only a single-plane design. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a dual-plane miniature planar 3D ECT sensor design using the 3 × 3 matrix electrode array.

The sensitivity map of dual-plane miniature planar 3D ECT sensor was analysed using 3D visualisation, the singular value decomposition and the axial resolution analysis. Then, the sensor was fabricated for performance analysis based on 3D imaging experiments.

The sensitivity map analysis showed that the dual-plane miniature planar 3D ECT sensor has enhanced the height sensing capability, and it is less ill-posed in 3D image reconstruction. The dual-plane miniature planar 3D ECT sensor showed a 28% improvement in reconstructed 3D image quality as compared to the single-plane sensor set-up.

The 3 × 3 matrix electrode array has been proposed to use only the necessary electrode pair combinations for image reconstruction. Besides, the increase in number of electrodes from the dual-plane sensor setup improved the height reconstruction of the test sample.

The purpose of this paper is to view the flow concentration of the flowing material in a pipeline conveyor.

Optical tomography provides a method to view the cross sectional image of flowing materials in a pipeline conveyor. Important flow information such as flow concentration profile, flow velocity and mass flow rate can be obtained without the need to invade the process vessel. The utilization of powerful computer together with expensive data acquisition system (DAQ) as the processing device in optical tomography systems has always been a norm. However, the advancements in silicon fabrication technology nowadays allow the fabrication of powerful digital signal processors (DSP) at reasonable cost. This allows the technology to be applied in optical tomography system to reduce or even eliminate the need of personal computer and the DAQ. The DSP system was customized to control the data acquisition of 16 × 16 optical sensors (arranged in orthogonal projection) and 23 × 23 optical sensors (arranged in rectilinear projections). The data collected were used to reconstruct the cross sectional image of flowing materials inside the pipeline. In the developed system, the accuracy of the image reconstruction was increased by 12.5 per cent by using new hybrid image reconstruction algorithm.

The results proved that the data acquisition and image reconstruction algorithm is capable of acquiring accurate data to reconstruct cross sectional images with only little error compared to the expected measurements.

The DSP system was customized to control the data acquisition of 16 × 16 optical sensors (arranged in orthogonal projection) and 23 × 23 optical sensors (arranged in rectilinear projections).