Redundancy Analysis of Capacitance Data of a Coplanar Electrode Array for Fast and Stable Imaging Processing

A coplanar electrode array sensor is established for the imaging of composite-material adhesive-layer defect detection. The sensor is based on the capacitive edge effect, which leads to capacitance data being considerably weak and susceptible to environmental noise. The inverse problem of coplanar array electrical capacitance tomography (C-ECT) is ill-conditioning, in which a small error of capacitance data can seriously affect the quality of reconstructed images. In order to achieve a stable image reconstruction process, a redundancy analysis method for capacitance data is proposed. The proposed method is based on contribution rate and anti-interference capability. According to the redundancy analysis, the capacitance data are divided into valid and invalid data. When the image is reconstructed by valid data, the sensitivity matrix needs to be changed accordingly. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the sensitivity map, singular value decomposition (SVD) is used. Finally, the two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) images are reconstructed by the Tikhonov regularization method. Through comparison of the reconstructed images of raw capacitance data, the stability of the image reconstruction process can be improved, and the quality of reconstructed images is not degraded. As a result, much invalid data are not collected, and the data acquisition time can also be reduced.