Investigation of gas–solid bubbling fluidized beds using ECT with a modified Tikhonov regularization technique

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) provides a non‐intrusive means to visualize cross‐sectional material distribution of gas–solid bubbling fluidized beds. Successful application of ECT strongly depends on the image reconstruction algorithm used. For on‐line measurements of bubbling fluidized beds, employing an algorithm that can produce high‐quality images without extensive computation is necessary. Using the conventional Tikhonov regularization algorithm, image quality in the central area is basically satisfied but suffers from artifacts in the near‐wall region. To solve this problem, a similar division operation learned from linear back projection was introduced to modify the conventional Tikhonov algorithm. Both numerical simulations and experiments were performed to evaluate the modified technique. The results indicate that the artifacts can be effectively removed and the reconstructed image quality is similar to Landweber method with dozens of iterations. Furthermore, the modified Tikhonov technique shows high accuracy when obtaining important hydrodynamic parameters in gas–solid bubbling fluidized beds. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 63: 29–41, 2018