Presently, Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) is positioned as a relatively mature and inexpensive tool for the diagnosis of non-conductive industrial processes. For most industrial applications, a hand-made approach for an ECT sensor and its 3D extended structure fabrication is used. Moreover, a hand-made procedure is often inaccurate, complicated, and time-consuming. Another drawback is that a hand-made ECT sensor's geometrical parameters, mounting base profile thickness, and electrode array shape usually depends on the structure of industrial test objects, tanks, and containers available on the market. Most of the traditionally fabricated capacitance tomography sensors offer external measurements only with electrodes localized outside of the test object. Although internal measurement is possible, it is often difficult to implement. This leads to limited in-depth scanning abilities and poor sensitivity distribution of traditionally fabricated ECT sensors. In this work we propose, demonstrate, and validate experimentally a new 3D ECT sensor fabrication process. The proposed solution uses a computational workflow that incorporates both 3D computer modeling and 3D-printing techniques. Such a 3D-printed structure can be of any shape, and the electrode layout can be easily fitted to a broad range of industrial applications. A developed solution offers an internal measurement due to negligible thickness of sensor mount base profile. This paper analyses and compares measurement capabilities of a traditionally fabricated 3D ECT sensor with novel 3D-printed design. The authors compared two types of the 3D ECT sensors using experimental capacitance measurements for a set of low-contrast and high-contrast permittivity distribution phantoms. The comparison demonstrates advantages and benefits of using the new 3D-printed spatial capacitance sensor regarding the significant fabrication time reduction as well as the improvement of overall measurement accuracy and stability.
Keywords: 3D; 3D-printing; ECT; modeling; sensors.