Comparison and cooperation of using camera and acoustic emission for solid particle flow measurement

A large number of different methods, such as sieving or microwave propagation, are available for solid particle flow measurement. This article discusses solid particle flow measurement via two different “on-line” methods with relatively simple instrumentation. The first technique is based on the application of an industrial camera (the computer vision method). Here, the information related to the solid particle flow is included directly in the image data, and the used software should be able to obtain the searched process quantities from the post processing of the recorded image data. The second approach consists in the acoustic emission method (AE); the impacting particles generate a pulse acoustic emission signal, which is measured by a piezoelectric wide-band sensor. Statistical analysis is required for obtaining the process quantities, too. This paper summarizes the measurement results produced by these two methods, compares the advantages and disadvantages of both techniques, and uses a real example to demonstrate the possibility of cooperation between these methods for the purpose of improving the measurement accuracy and reliability.