Räumlich hochauflösende Computertomografie mit Gammastrahlung zur Untersuchung von Mehrphasenströmungen

Multiphase flows denote flowing mixtures of different fluids, solids and gases, such as oil, water and air. A phase is defined in a thermo dynamical sense as a physically homo-geneous portion of a material. Multiphase flows are to be found in many industrial proc-esses and plants, for instance in oil production, chemical reactors, energy production or driving systems. In many cases, process efficiency as well as safety is directly coupled with the flow behaviour inside industrial facilities. Therefore, there was and is a strong development of invasive and non-invasive measuring and imaging techniques with the aim to improve our understanding of physical flow phenomena and achieve flow optimi-sation and control wherever necessary. Furthermore, flow measurement technology plays an important role in the derivation of physical models for flow simulation with so called CFD (computational fluid dynamics) codes.
Computed tomography (CT) is a non invasive imaging technique that produces non superimposed cross sectional images using analytical, algebraic or statistical reconstruc-tion algorithms. Radiation based transmission tomography therefore employs a radiation source, such as a nuclide or an X-ray source, and a spatially resolving radiation detec-tor. Such as measurement system must acquire radioscopic projections from different angular positions, which can be accomplished either by rotating it around the object of investigation or by rotation of the object itself. In industrial applications nuclide sources with photon energies higher than 500 keV are often used. Such radiation can penetrate metal housings and still gives sufficient contrast between the phases that have to be analysed.
In this work, a new high resolution gamma radiation computed tomography system that uses a 137Cs source was developed. The design and the electronic parts were carefully developed for the application in harsh industrial environments (e.g. temperature and humidity variation as well as electrical and magnetic fields respectively) and high meas-urement accuracy. The spatial resolution of the detector arc is about 2 mm, the stop-ping efficiency for gamma photons with 662 keV energy is about 75% and the deviation of measuring repetition is lower than 1%. The detector arc operates in pulse mode al-lowing excluding scattered gamma photons to a certain degree from the measurement by a pulse height discriminator stage. The developed measurement system was success-fully applied in industrial and laboratory measurement campaigns, for instance meas-urements on an electrically heated rod bundle, a fluid coupling and a chemical reactor. Due to the quantum limitations of the radiation source and slow rotation of the heavy scanner elements the developed gamma radiation computed tomography system can only be used for time-averaged flow measurement with integration times in the range of one minute or more. However, within the frame of this work an extension of the system to the measurement of rapidly rotating fluid distributions is shown. Here, the principle of angle-resolved data acquisition has been implemented which was highly challenging for this type of high resolution radiation detector from an electronic point of view. The developed gamma ray tomography system is not only valuable for flow measurement but has a much wider application range, such as high-energy non-destructive testing of materials and components, such as castings, vehicle constructions or palaeontological objects.