ERT imaging and linkage to CFD for stirred vessels in the chemical process industry

Stirred vessels in the chemical process industry are largely devoid of instrumentation, which can visualise the internal concentrations and phase distribution. An electrical resistance tomography (ERT) system installed on a 1 metre/1 tonne scale pilot plant vessel is described. Some earlier applications showing how fluid mixing and precipitation can be imaged in time and space using solid-body graphics are described based on pseudo-3D assembly of several axial sensing planes. Simplified computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides a density of predictions, which is commensurate with the multiple interior point detail O (10³) furnished by the ERT system. More recent improvements are portrayed, which use full 3D interrogation of the fluid space coupled with fully 3D reconstruction from a set of peripheral measurements. Simplified CFD also emphasises the potential for ERT imaging of batch-fed bioreactors. Potential future developments of this imaging technology are briefly presented.