ERT Based Computation of Solid Phase Fraction in Solid-Liquid Flow With Various Object Sizes

Solid phase fraction (SPF) is one of the most important parameters in solid-liquid two-phase flow, and has been increasingly addressed on most of the measuring techniques. As an effective measuring technique, Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) has been applied to measure SPF owing to low-cost, fast-response, non-invasive and non- radiation characteristics. The ERT-based SPF estimation is greatly affected by different solid object sizes from the existing methods, but currently there is none efficient method to solve this problem. In this paper, a mathematical model firstly is proposed to generally approximate various object sizes and thereby reconstruct all measurements. Therefore, when all solid objects have unevenly distributed and different sizes, SPF can still be effectively computed. Experiments are implemented in three groups of actual experiments by a building platform, where the solid objects in each group have individual object size. Results show that the new method can compute the value of SPF more accurate than the existing method, and thus provide a more accurate way to SPF computation.