Microwave-tomographic system for oil- and gas-multiphase-flow imaging

Since the early 1980s, a number of electrical imaging techniques based on capacitance, resistance, or inductance measurement at low frequencies have been developed for the monitoring of industrial processes, such as oil- and gas-multiphase flows. In principle, microwave tomography would produce higher resolution images than these low-frequency techniques. But it has mainly been studied for medical applications over the past two decades and is less developed for industrial applications. In this paper, the development of an experimental microwave-tomography system intended for oil- and gas-flow measurements is described, which includes the hardware for data acquisition and the numerical algorithm for image reconstruction. The investigation of the system for the imaging of static–dielectric phantoms modelling oil- and gas-flow distributions is reported together with the images obtained at two different microwave frequencies: 2.5 GHz and 4 GHz. It has been demonstrated that images of the dielectric phantoms can be reconstructed using the system, with the images obtained at 4 GHz having better quality and higher resolution.