A Magnetic Induction Tomography System for Prospective Industrial Processing Applications

Magnetic induction tomography (MIT) is one of the newest industrial process imaging techniques. Main industrial applications of the MIT imaging are in high conductive flow imaging. However, recently it has been shown that the MIT may be useful for low conductive process imaging. This paper presents a cost effective hardware design for MIT in industrial applications, called Bath-MKI industrial MIT system. The system comprises 8 inductor coils and has the possibility of expansion to 16 coils. The excitation signals and the measured voltages are generated and measured using a LabView based system. Two 16 by 1 multiplexers are used to select between the coils. Measurements, excitation and multiplexing are all controlled by a National Instrument (NI) USB based DAQ: USB-6259 and a signal generator. Using the same electronics, the prototype is tested with two different coil arrays; one is a small scale ferrite core coil and one larger scale air cored coil. Experimental image reconstruction results are shown using both small scale and large scale coil arrays.