Enhanced imaging of piezoresistive nanocomposites through the incorporation of nonlocal conductivity changes in electrical impedance tomography

Electrical impedance tomography is a method of noninvasively imaging the internal conductivity distribution of a domain. Because many materials exhibit piezoresistivity, electrical impedance tomography has considerable potential for application in structural health monitoring. Despite its numerous benefits such as being low cost, providing continuous sensing, and having the ability to be employed in real time, electrical impedance tomography is limited by several important factors such as the ill-posed nature of the inverse problem and the requirement for large electrode arrays to produce quality images. Unfortunately, current methods of mitigating these limitations impose upon the benefits of electrical impedance tomography. Herein, we propose a multi-physics approach of enhancing electrical impedance tomography without sacrificing any of its benefits. This approach is predicated on coupling global conductivity changes with the electrical impedance tomography inversion process thereby adding additional constraints and rendering the problem less ill-posed. Additionally, we leverage physically motivated global conductivity changes in the context of piezoresistive nanocomposites. We demonstrate this proof of concept with numerical simulations and demonstrate that by incorporating multiple conductivity changes, the rank of the sensitivity matrix can be improved and the quality of electrical impedance tomography reconstructions can be enhanced. The proposed method, therefore, has the potential of easing the implementation burden of electrical impedance tomography while concurrently enabling high-quality images to be produced without imposing on the major advantages of electrical impedance tomography.