A limited region electrical capacitance tomography for detection of wax deposits and scales in pipelines

Piplines are very critical infrestructures allowing flow of many essential compoenets in modern lifes. The deposite of scales and waxes can creat problem in many industrial flow. Examples are in scale formation on crude oil piplines. For Crude oil piplines a chemical removal method is used for cleaning of the deposites in aboveground piplines and a pigging method is used for underground and subsea piplines. Deposite of scales is a major source of malfunctioning of the pipline and the downtime of cleaning process can be very costly. In this paper we present a high resolution limited region [1]electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) for reconstruction of deposite in interior of plastic pipes[2, 3]. ECT provides an early detection of level of scaling and deposites in pipline using a non-invasive capacitive measurements. In our proposed method a simple limited region tomography algorithm is developed enhancing the ECT imaging resolution allowing for detection of low level depositions. The experimental results are shown in figure 1. Further labaratory experimental data will be used to evaluate smallest level of deposite that can be detected.