Electric Potential of Various 4-electrode Segmentation Excitation for Electrical Capacitance Tomography System

Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) system is a non-intrusive method to detect variation of permittivity distribution in a closed pipe. ECT offers fast response, cheap and non-radiation system. However, it suffers from soft-field effect. One of the proposed solutions to overcome this problem is by applying segmentation excitation, which is to have more than one electrode excited at one time. This paper focuses on various segmentation excitations of 4-electrode combinations using COMSOL Multiphysics software. The electrical potential is recorded at the center of the pipe to study the strength of the electrical potential. The result indicates that 4-electrode adjacent configuration recorded 1.005 x 10^-9V at the center of the pipe as compared to 0.838 x 10^-9V for opposite configuration. This effect shows 16.6% difference in electrical potential at the center of the pipe.