Electrical capacitance tomography: principles, techniques and applications

Electrical capacitance tomography system is useful for obtaining information about spatial distribution of a mixture of dielectric materials inside a vessel. This study is aimed to obtain real-time monitoring of the composition of liquid mixture in conveying pipeline. ECT is a non-invasive, non-intrusive and non-destructive technique that can measure the flow level inside a pipeline. In order to increase the image resolution and produce accurate result of current tomography research, a study on 16-electrodes sensor ECT system has been developed. The developed system has the mobility to be assembled and moved from a pipeline to another. The intelligent on-board mobility sensor technique has never been applied on an ECT system, it is a new technique and investigation of the ECT system. The system however can be assembled in different diameters of pipelines, and the number of the electrodes sensors can be reduced according to the different sizes of the pipelines without the need to redesign the electrodes sensors. In order to reduce the cost of an ECT system, Universal Serial Bus technology (USB) has been used as data transfering method. The final target of a tomography system is to control process and output of the pipeline and therefore a very high speed measurement and data transferring method is required to monitor the materials that flow inside the pipeline. In this case, a high speed data processing rate for data acquisition system and a high speed data reconstruction and image display system have been developed. As a result, a microcontroller that supports full-speed USB data transfer rate has been designed as the central control unit. The reconstruction image process in the PC was written using programming platform Visual Basic 6.0. The information obtained in the PC can be reconstructed using linear back projection algorithm. In order to improve data result, iterative algorithm has been implemented in this system in order to obtain a precise image of the flow in the pipeline

Effect of physical and mechanical properties of PU biopolymer membranes upon use of different fabrication techniques

In developing polymer membranes that response to prevents liquid water from penetrating through, while at the same time permitting moisture past out through, polymer membrane with various structure ranging from dense to highly asymmetric morphologies (0.01 - 0.25 mm) were fabricated through three different techniques; blends, curing and grafting fabrication. From FT-IR analysis, BP/PEG (blends, curing and grafting) were fully converted into solid polymer membrane with functional group of N-H stretching in region 3350 - 3250 cm-1. Morphological result of BP/PEG shows three types of surface; open, close and blind surface with cylindrical blind and ink bottle shaped structure randomly. Due to lower porosity of skin over a symmetric support acts as a barrier, BP/PEG polymer membranes resultant no water permeability as compared to BP/DMF, which exhibit extremely higher water permeability with value 0.161 L/s.m3 at lower concentration. Water absorption analysis shows that mechanical properties of the prepared membranes were significantly influenced by their structure and amount of water absorbed. Thus, BP/PEG (blends, curing and grafting) preparation gave lower amount of water absorption with less than 0.01% water absorption increment rather than BP/DMF 12% (w/v) with highly porosity value of 0.07%. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) reviewed that the hard segment decomposition temperature was occur at 295 0C – 395 0C, meanwhile for soft segment at 370 0C – 500 0C. Based upon modulus, tensile, strain and tear strength also energy at break, evidently shows that the BP/PEG (grafting) method gave the best performance on physical and mechanical properties with highest mean value of 12419 N/mm, 14.11 MPa, 38.289 %, 50.67 N/mm and 21.627 N respectively. Reciprocally, PEG solvent does significantly increase the mechanical properties with the reaction of BP rather than DMF solvent with varieties of concentration. Moreover, BP/PEG membrane from each fabrication technique had obvious dense porous structural feature with open, close and blind pores in practically boundless development as of adequate final use in membrane application