Multi-phase flow monitoring with electrical impedance tomography using level set based method

•LSM has been used for shape reconstruction to monitor multi-phase flow using EIT.•Multi-phase level set model for conductivity is represented by two level set functions.•LSM handles topological merging and breaking naturally during evolution process.•To reduce the computational time, a narrowband technique was applied.•Use of narrowband and optimization approach results in efficient and fast method.

In this paper, a level set-based reconstruction scheme is applied to multi-phase flow monitoring using electrical impedance tomography (EIT). The proposed scheme involves applying a narrowband level set method to solve the inverse problem of finding the interface between the regions having different conductivity values. The multi-phase level set model for the conductivity distribution inside the domain is represented by two level set functions. The key principle of the level set-based method is to implicitly represent the shape of interface as the zero level set of higher dimensional function and then solve a set of partial differential equations. The level set-based scheme handles topological merging and breaking naturally during the evolution process. It also offers several advantages compared to traditional pixel-based approach. Level set-based method for multi-phase flow is tested with numerical and experimental data. It is found that level set-based method has better reconstruction performance when compared to pixel-based method.