Verification of fluidized bed electrical capacitance tomography measurements with a fibre optic probe

Previous studies aimed at determining the spatial accuracy of electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) have employed phantoms placed within the ECT measurement space. No previous studies have compared ECT with a second independent measurement technique in an operating fluidized bed. In the present work, radial voidage profiles have been measured with ECT in the 0.14-m I.D. riser of a circulating fluidized bed (CFB) and in a bubbling fluidized bed with a 0.19-m I.D. The dynamic and time-averaged radial voidage profiles have been compared with measurements taken with a fibre optic probe in the same riser and in a slightly narrower (0.15-m I.D.) bubbling fluidized bed. In spite of the intrusiveness of the latter technique, the time-averaged radial profiles in the CFB riser fall within 10% of each other when the CFB is operated at high-flux conditions that lead to a very dense wall region. Iterative reconstruction of the ECT images is not needed in this case. Similar agreement is found between the two techniques in the bubbling fluidized bed, but off-line iterative image reconstruction is clearly necessary in this fluidization regime. These results suggest that ECT, which is often described as a tomographic imaging technique with low spatial resolution, can in fact provide semi-quantitative time-averaged images of the cross-section of fluidized beds of diameter comparable to or less than that used here.