Studies of the factors influencing the imaging performance of the capacitive imaging technique

• Influencing factors for the imaging performance of the CI technique are highlighted.
• Experimental condition variations affect the measurement sensitivity distribution.
• Studies on the influencing factors provide indications on CI performance improvement.

The capacitive imaging (CI) technique has been successfully used in many NDE applications. Previous work of the CI technique has been focused on exploring the application range of this technique, and the factors that may affect the imaging performance have never been studied systematically. In this work, the factors influencing the imaging performance of the CI technique on both non-conducting and conducting specimens are discussed and studied experimentally. The studies of the factors are helpful for understanding the relationship between the experiment conditions and the CI performance and may provide indications on how to improve the CI performance.