Two-field excitation for contactless inductive flow tomography

Contactless Inductive Flow Tomography (CIFT) is a flow measurement technique allowing for visualizing the global flow in electrically conducting fluids. The method is based on the precise measurement of very weak induced magnetic fields arising from the fluid motion under the influence of one or several primary excitation magnetic field(s). The simultaneous use of more than one excitation magnetic field is necessary to fully reconstruct three-dimensional liquid metal flows, yet is not trivial as the scalar values of induced magnetic field at the sensors need to be disentangled for each contribution of the excitation fields. Another approach is to multiplex the excitation fields. Here the temporal resolution of the measurement needs to be kept as high as possible. We apply two trapezoidal-shaped excitation magnetic fields with perpendicular direction to each other to a mechanically driven liquid metal flow. The consecutive application by multiplexing enables to determine the flow structure in the liquid with a temporal resolution down to 3 s with the existing equipment.