Monitoring of air tunnels in a cylindrical storage device using ECT tomography

This article focuses on the monitoring of air tunnels in sand, which in common practice are characterised as flow disturbances in the flow of bulk materials inside storage devices, hoppers, silos etc. In this case air tunnels are monitored by the ECT (Electrical Capacitance Tomography) method. The basic principle of the ECT tomographic method is the measurement of permittivity of a measured non-conducting medium. The results gained by an ECT device are then compared with the real, precisely defined measured state. The measured results show that the monitoring of flow disturbances in storage devices using ECT is a new method which does not use optical methods during measurement.