Electrical Resistance Imaging of Bubble Boundary in Annular Two-Phase Flows Using Unscented Kalman Filter

For the visualization of the phase boundary in annular two-phase flows, the electrical resistance tomography (ERT) technique is introduced. In ERT, a set of predetermined electrical currents is injected trough the electrodes placed on the boundary of the flow passage and the induced electrical potentials are measured on the electrode. With the relationship between the injected currents and the induced voltages, the electrical conductivity distribution across the flow domain is estimated through the image reconstruction algorithm. In this, the conductivity distribution corresponds to the phase distribution. In the application of ERT to two-phase flows where there are only two conductivity values, the conductivity distribution estimation problem can be transformed into the boundary estimation problem. This paper considers a bubble boundary estimation with ERT in annular two-phase flows. As the image reconstruction algorithm, the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is adopted since from the control theory it is reported that the UKF shows better performance than the extended Kalman filter (EKF) that has been commonly used. We formulated the UKF algorithm to be incorporate into the image reconstruction algorithm for the present problem. Also, phantom experiments have been conducted to evaluate the improvement by UKF