Bubble mapping: three-dimensional visualisation of gas–liquid flow regimes using electrical tomography

It is well known that electrical tomography is capable of 'seeing' through opaque pipe walls and flow media. However, due to the relatively low spatial resolution, electrical tomograms are ineffective on visualisation of small bubbles or sharp interfaces between large bubbles and the liquid. These limitations give rise to ambiguity in human and/or machine perception of flow dynamics from presenting bubble cluster and blurry boundaries of large bubbles in faint colour or grey. In this paper, a binary approach, called bubble mapping, is proposed to enhance the visibility of flow regime in gas–liquid pipeline flows. With the input gas concentration tomograms reconstructed by an electrical tomography, the method takes the major visual characteristics of typical flow regimes in common recognition as a prior knowledge and replaces the conventional colour mapping with a number of bubbles and their mergence with a thresholding value. With this approach, a stack of cross-sectional tomograms by electrical tomography is transformed and displayed as a collection of individual gas bubbles. The transformation is done with the help of a lookup table indexed by bubble size and an enhanced isosurface algorithm for vivid three-dimensional visualisation. This new approach has been applied to a gas-in-water flow rig and its performance is compared with photo images taken by a high-speed camera. Reasonable agreements have been obtained for common flow regimes including bubbly flow, stratified flow, plug flow, slug flow and annular flow in horizontal pipe and bubbly flow, slug flow and annular flow in vertical pipe. Results evidence the method can provide a photorealistic flow visualisation and therefore enhance the visibility of electrical tomograms for visual identification of flow regime, particularly for opaque media in industrial flows.