Design and application of a multi-modal process tomography system

This paper presents a design and application study of an integrated multi-modal system designed to support a range of common modalities: electrical resistance, electrical capacitance and ultrasonic tomography. Such a system is designed for use with complex processes that exhibit behaviour changes over time and space, and thus demand equally diverse sensing modalities. A multi-modal process tomography system able to exploit multiple sensor modes must permit the integration of their data, probably centred upon a composite process model. The paper presents an overview of this approach followed by an overview of the systems engineering and integrated design constraints. These include a range of hardware oriented challenges: the complexity and specificity of the front-end electronics for each modality; the need for front-end data pre-processing and packing; the need to integrate the data to facilitate data fusion; and finally the features to enable successful fusion and interpretation. A range of software aspects are also reviewed: the need to support differing front-end sensors for each modality in a generic fashion; the need to communicate with front-end data pre-processing and packing systems, the need to integrate the data to allow data fusion; and finally to enable successful interpretation. The review of the system concepts is illustrated with an application to the study of a complex multi-component process.