Imaging of fluid flow by tomographic reconstruction using enhanced multipath ultrasonic measurements

The major goal of the present research was to obtain high accuracy (0.5% or better) in an ultrasonic flowmeter by scanning the flow in an efficient manner, and in such a way that flow in each of the various spots or pixels that make up the cross-section of a pipe would be included and given an appropriate weight. The flow image can be reconstructed by data processing after multipath scanning of the flow. The influence of the flow velocity profile on the accuracy of time-of-flight ultrasonic measurements of the tomographic type was analyzed and verified experimentally. The applicability of iterative algorithms (in particular, algebraic reconstruction technique) and several variants of tomographic algorithms for parallel-path and fan-beam sampling of the flow were examined.