Electrical impedance imaging of two-phase flows undergoing rapid transient: Part I. Dynamic imaging

This study presents a visualization technique for the phase distribution in a two-phase flow field with electrical impedance imaging technique, which reconstructs the resistivity distribution with electrical responses that are determined by corresponding excitations. Special emphasis is placed on the development of dynamic imaging technique for two-phase system undergoing rapid transient, which could not be visualized with conventional static imaging techniques. The proposed algorithm treats the image reconstruction problem as a nonlinear state estimation problem and the unknown state (resistivity distribution, i.e. phase distribution) is estimated with the aid of Kalman filter in a minimum mean square error sense. With computer simulations, some issues arisen in the application to two-phase flows are discussed and the performance of the proposed algorithm is examined.