Virtual Centre for Industrial & Process Tomography

This new technology uses multipoint sampling to make measurements across three dimensional space, using electrical impedance, electrical resistance, ultrasound, X-rays or Terahertz energies. The comparative differences across the sampling nodes are in turn digitally processed, allowing real time analysis and feedback.

It provides measurement where conventional monitoring instruments cannot be operated, due to either the nature of the containment or the process underway. Not only that, the planar results can be interpolated to produce on-line queryable three dimensional data and visual representations, allowing for a far greater degree of understanding of what is actually taking place.

Where is Tomography Useful?

Tomography allows chemical process users to estimate the spatial distribution of phases and chemicals inside their processing vessels or pipelines, giving instant feedback on reaction processes, or efficiency of transport. Striking augmented-reality 3-D images can be reconstructed from non-invasive peripheral sensing. In pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals, monitoring the critical processes of high value products is essential, and in the food industry, tomography offers great insights into the structural transformations found in colloids and gels. In mineral engineering, tomography can monitor separation and transport operations continuously, helping ensure maximum production.

Across countless other activities, tomography allows for characterisation of particulate and structural systems, and hybrid situations involving gasses, liquids and solids Medical body-scanning has long been established and uses ultrasound and magnetic-resonance imaging to generate tomographic images, and terahertz energy is now beginning to come on-line. But unlike medical imaging, a number of available process tomography techniques are very fast, simple and inexpensive. They can provide unparalleled information about whatís going on inside the process.