Interpretation of CT‐Scan Sinograms to Study the Dynamic Flow Properties of a Fluidized Bed

Fast moving objects typically produce poor quality images and motion‐artifacts in Computed Tomography (CT) scans. The imaging of bubbling gas‐solid fluidized beds, where many bubbles may pass through the sensing cross‐section in a tomographic measurement, gives such a problem. Previously, one method of dealing with this problem was to remove artifacts from the reconstructed image itself through low pass filtering. However, this method leads to lost information from the images. When the concentration of bubbles is low, and their shape is close to cylindrically symmetric, analysis of consecutive scans in the raw data sinogram can also provide valuable information about the frequency of bubbles passing, and about their individual size, shape and position. Then, utilizing the inverse Abel transform, this information can then also be used to contribute to time averaged properties of the bed’s behaviour such as voidage distribution, bubble phase area fraction and spatial bubble number distribution.