Juliana Padilha Leitzke and Hubert Zangl
This paper aims to present an approach based on electrical impedance tomography spectroscopy (EITS) for the determination of water and ice fraction in low-power applications such…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to present an approach based on electrical impedance tomography spectroscopy (EITS) for the determination of water and ice fraction in low-power applications such as autarkic wireless sensors, which require a low computational complexity reconstruction approach and a low number of electrodes. This paper also investigates how the electrode design can affect the reconstruction results in tomography.
Design/methodology/approach
EITS is performed by using a non-iterative method called optimal first order approximation. In addition to that, a planar electrode geometry is used instead of the traditional circular electrode geometry. Such a structure allows the system to identify materials placed on the region above the sensor, which do not need to be confined in a pipe. For the optimization, the mean squared error (MSE) between the reference images and the obtained reconstructed images was calculated.
Findings
The authors demonstrate that even with a low number of four electrodes and a low complexity reconstruction algorithm, a reasonable reconstruction of water and ice fractions is possible. Furthermore, it is shown that an optimal distribution of the sensor electrodes can help to reduce the MSE without any costs in terms of computational complexity or power consumption.
Originality/value
This paper shows through simulations that the reconstruction of ice and water mixtures is possible and that the electrode design is a topic of great importance, as they can significantly affect the reconstruction results.
Details
Keywords
Stephan Mühlbacher-Karrer, Juliana Padilha Leitzke, Lisa-Marie Faller and Hubert Zangl
This paper aims to investigate the usability of the non-iterative monotonicity approach for electrical capacitance tomography (ECT)-based object detection. This is of particular…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the usability of the non-iterative monotonicity approach for electrical capacitance tomography (ECT)-based object detection. This is of particular importance with respect to object detection in robotic applications.
Design/methodology/approach
With respect to the detection problem, the authors propose a precomputed threshold value for the exclusion test to speed up the algorithm. Furthermore, they show that the use of an inhomogeneous split-up strategy of the region of interest (ROI) improves the performance of the object detection.
Findings
The proposed split-up strategy enables to use the monotonicity approach for robotic applications, where the spatial placement of the electrodes is constrained to a planar geometry. Additionally, owing to the improvements in the exclusion tests, the selection of subregions in the ROI allows for avoiding self-detection. Furthermore, the computational costs of the algorithm are reduced owing to the use of a predefined threshold, while the detection capabilities are not significantly influenced.
Originality/value
The presented simulation results show that the adapted split-up strategies for the ROI improve significantly the detection performance in comparison to the traditional ROI split-up strategy. Thus, the monotonicity approach becomes applicable for ECT-based object detection for applications, where only a reduced number of electrodes with constrained spatial placement can be used, such as in robotics.