Tomographic Wire-Mesh Imaging of Water-Air Flow Based on Sparse Minimization

The wire-mesh sensor is widely used in the measurement of two-phase flow. Comparing with the other flow imaging methods, the wire-mesh method has the advantages of high temporal resolution, cost efficiency, and with high robustness against effects of flow patterns, but suffers from the comparatively low resolution. In this paper, a tomographic method was proposed to enhance the spatial resolution of the wire-mesh sensor. The wire-mesh image is refined through reconstruction with a linear observation model and the raw data from the wire-mesh sensor. The sparse minimization method with folded concave penalty was presented to solve the image reconstruction problem. The numerical and experimental results show that the proposed method can produce the resolution-enhanced wire-mesh images with less artifacts and distinct phase interfaces, and thus gives a theoretically possibility to observing the details of the target flow conditions.