Prof. Wuqiang Yang

Abstract

Among various industrial tomography modalities, electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is the most mature and has been used for many challenging applications. ECT is based on measuring very small capacitance and reconstructing the permittivity distribution in a cross section of an industrial process, such as a multiphase flow or a fluidised bed. The internal information obtained by ECT is valuable for understanding complicated phenomena, verifying CFD models and simulation results, measurement and control of complicated processes. Compared with other tomography modalities, ECT has several advantages of no radioactive, fast response, both non-intrusive and non-invasive, withstanding high temperature and high pressure and of low-cost. Because of very small capacitance to be measured (down to 0.0001 pF) and the “soft-field” nature, ECT does present challenges in circuit design, solving the inverse problem and re-engineering. Our latest AC-based ECT system can generate online images at 300 frames per second with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 73 dB. Examples of industrial applications include the measurement of gas/oil/water flows, wet gas separation, pneumatic conveyors, cyclone separators and fluidised beds for pharmaceutical manufacturing and clean use of coal by circulating fluidised bed combustion and methanol-to-olefins conversion. During this talk, ECT will be discussed from principle to industrial applications, together with a demonstration of an AC-based ECT system.

Biography:

Wuqiang Yang is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the IET and Fellow of the Institute of Measurement and Control. Since 1991, he has been working with University of Manchester (formerly UMIST) in the UK and became Professor of Electronic Instrumentation in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 2005. His main research interests include industrial tomography, especially electrical capacitance tomography (ECT), sensing and data acquisition systems, circuit design, image reconstruction algorithms, instrumentation and multiphase flow measurement. He has published 500 papers. He is a referee for over 50 journals (including 6 IEEE journals), Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. IM, editorial board member of 6 other journals (including Meas. Sci. Technol.), guest editor of many journal special issues and visiting professor at several other universities. Currently, he is editing a book “Imaging sensors” for IET Publishing. He received several national awards, including the 1997 IEE/NPL Wheatstone Measurement Prize. He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer from 2010 to 2016, JSPS Invitation Fellows in 2016, Vice Chair of 2017 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I²MTC), and Honorary Chair of IEEE International Conference on Imaging System and Techniques for many years. His biography has been included in Who’s Who in the World since 2002.