Design of an Electrical Capacitance Tomography System based on LabVIEW

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is an effective technique for visualizing the distribution of dielectric materials inside a closed pipe or vessel. The design of an ECT system based on LabVIEW is described in this paper. The system can be divided into three parts: sensor system, data acquisition system, and imaging computer. The data acquisition system designed takes C8051F700 MCU as the core to acquire capacitance data. The computer implements the functions such as data processing, image reconstruction, image display and system control. Serial communication is used between the data acquisition system and the computer. LabVIEW, a graphical programming language, is chosen as the development environment. An optimal thresholding scheme is proposed which can reduce low grey-level artifacts effectively. Equipped with a classic ECT sensor or a direct 3D ECT sensor, the system designed can work in 2D reconstruction mode or direct 3D reconstruction mode. The software design in LabVIEW is focused on.