Theoretical and experimental evaluation of rotational magnetic induction tomography

Magnetic induction tomography (MIT) is a new and emerging tomographic imaging technique, which has found applications in industrial process tomography and material inspection, particularly for imaging metallic objects. In this paper, a rotational MIT (RMIT) system has been developed, in which a coil array is rotated with respect to a central axis perpendicular to the plane of the coil array. The RMIT is capable of producing images with better quality as a result of increasing the number of independent measurements. An eight-coil MIT system has been developed to generate the experimental data required in this paper. To show the proof of principle, a manual rotational scheme has been implemented. The advantages of the RMIT system have been established using theoretical analysis and comparison of the underlying inverse problem in MIT and RMIT. The effectiveness of RMIT has been shown using both synthetic and experimental data. Several image quality measures have been used to critically evaluate RMIT against the traditional MIT system.