Manchester’s legacy as the world’s first industrial city, combined with its stellar reputation for scientific innovation, is proudly continued by Manchester-based technology firm Industrial Tomography Systems (ITS).
With its head office adjacent to both the site of the Peterloo Incident and the Rise up, Women statue, honouring the legacy of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Industrial Tomography Systems (ITS) has harnessed Manchester’s progressive spirit by leading a global technological revolution in the field of applied tomography.
Founded in 1997, as a fledging enterprise based on technology devised at The University of Manchester, ITS has grown to serve a broad range of industries around the globe ranging from oil refining, chemical manufacturing, nuclear engineering, dairy production, along with food and beverage manufacturing. ITS’s client list includes several Fortune 500 companies including household names like Nestle and GlaxoSmithKline.
ITS’s continued growth necessitated the formation of a sister company, Process Flow Intelligence (PFI) whose purpose is to focus on the terrestrial mining, deep sea mining, dredging, and tunneling industries around the globe.
Meanwhile ITS continues to engage an ever present client list from the dairy and pharmaceutical industries as well as maintaining its perennial association with academia and other government and private research institutions where ITS technology is often used as a “hard science” research tool to validate computer modeling along with many other uses.
The outlook for ITS and PFI is extremely positive. The beauty of tomography is its versatility and the way it can be applied in a very broad range of industries by providing real-time information in a format that can be perfectly well understood by a layman. This in itself produces a range of benefits for any industry from improved product quality, maximising process efficiency, and reducing energy costs.
What is tomography?
While some of us are probably familiar with the term “CT Scan” within a medical context, few of us may know that it stands for “computed tomography scan.” Just as a CT scan provides medical professionals with the ability to see inside the human body in real time, ITS’s tomography expertise provides industry professionals with similar observational and data collection powers in real-time.
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Comparison of a tomograph with a photograph captured during a yogurt mixing trial. The photographs show raw yoghurt mixed with strawberry confiture just prior to entering a 16-electrode ERT sensor array. The associated tomographs are still shots charting the mixing process from inside the sensor and monitor the eventual homogeneity of the yoghurt.
How is tomography used in industry and research?
Many manufacturing processes involve a liquid flowing through a pipe at a pivotal stage of their production process – this also includes mixing and separating operations. Tomography provides a manufacturer with the ability to ‘see through’ the wall of the pipe, or vessel, to monitor its liquefied contents in real time and assess its density, concentration, and emulsification.
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Process Flow Intelligence (PFI)’s data acquisition system used in the dredging, mining, deep-sea mining, and tunnelling industries to measure slurry density, slurry height, and velocity.
How Does It Work?
While tomography comes in many forms, ITS and PFI focus mainly on electrical resistance tomography (ERT) and electrical capacitance tomography (ECT). With ERT, sensors placed inside the pipe or vessel measure the relative electrical conductive properties of the components of the liquid flowing through the pipe or being mixed or separated in a vessel.
ECT is used when a substance or compound lacks the sufficient electrical conductive properties to allow ERT to work properly. ECT, instead, relies on capacitance or the ability of the monitored substance(s) to hold an electric charge.
An obvious difference with ERT is that ECT sensors are situated on the outside of the conduit, pipe, or vessel. This means that both ERT and ECT can be made to work together as a dual-modality system, depending on the properties of the compound being monitored.
Irrespective of the modality, the data gathered from the sensors is then interpreted by ITS software to render a tomogram: a dynamic 2D or 3D image in real time. Data gathered can also be represented as a Cartesian graph or any other format as required by the client.
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User interface for the Windows-based ITS P2+ data acquisition unit showing tomograms in 2D and 3D across a 4-plane sensor array captured while monitoring a separation process but can be equally applied to any mixing process.
