KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Imaging Industrial Processes by Electrical Capacitance Tomography

Prof. Wuqiang Yang
The University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Abstract

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is an imaging technique for industrial applications. The basic principle of ECT is to measure capacitance from multiple capacitance electrodes, which surround a dielectric process, and to reconstruct cross-sectional images, aiming to visualise the dielectric process. The internal information, which can be obtained by ECT, is valuable for understanding complicated processes, verifying computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models, measurement and control. Compared with other industrial tomography modalities, ECT is the most mature and offers advantages of no radiation, rapid response, non-intrusive and non-invasive, withstanding high temperature and high pressure and low-cost.
ECT has been used for many challenging industrial applications, such as gas/oil/water flows in oil pipelines, wet gas separators, pneumatic conveyors, cyclone separators and fluidised beds. In particular, fluidised beds in the pharmaceutical industry are currently operated by trial-and-error, because of the lack of online measurement tools. As a result, the operation of the pharmaceutical fluidised beds cannot be optimised, the operation efficiency is low, and more importantly the product quality cannot be guaranteed. ECT has been used in pharmaceutical fluidised beds successfully. Test results of drying, granulation and coating processes on lab-scale, semi-industrial-scale and production-scale fluidised beds are promising.
In this keynote, the principle of ECT, including image reconstruction algorithms, will be briefly introduced. Some industrial applications, in particular pharmaceutical fluidised beds, and issues related to image processing will be discussed, together with a demonstration of an ECT system.

Biography of the Keynote Speaker

Professor Wuqiang Yang received BEng (with Distinction), MSc and PhD (with Distinction) degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing. After 3 years Lecturer at Tsinghua University, he joined UMIST in 1991 and currently he is a Professor at The University of Manchester. His main research interests include industrial process tomography, especially electrical capacitance tomography (ECT), image reconstruction, sensing and data acquisition systems, electronic circuit design, instrumentation and multiphase flow measurement. Professor Yang is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of IEE and Senior Member of IEEE. He has published 250 papers, including review articles and he reviews papers for 30 journals. He is a Visiting Professor/Science Advisor in 6 universities/organisations and an editorial board member of 4 journals. He received 1997 IEE Measurement Prize, 1997 Honeywell Prize from the Institute of Measurement and Control, 2000 IEE Ayrton Premium and 2009 IET Innovation Award Finalist. His biography has been included in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Science and Engineering and Who's Who in America since 2002. He is recognised by International Center for Scientific Research (France) as one of top 30 technology researchers in the world. In 2010, he was appointed IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Distinguished Lecturer.