Research conducted within the TOMOCON project included the technological development of a variety of tomographic sensors to fit the different requirements and control objectives for the four demonstration processes: Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) and Wire-Mesh Sensors (WMS) for inline fluid separation, Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) and Microwave Tomography (MWT) for microwave drying, Contactless Inductive Flow Tomography (CIFT) and Magnetic Induction Tomography (MIT) for continuous casting and Ultrasound Tomography (UST) and ERT for batch crystallization.
For each process, the appropriate numerical methods have been selected resulting in the choice of different numerical tools: The in-house JADIM code for inline fluid separation, COMSOL Multiphysics for microwave drying, OpenFOAM for continuous casting and ANSYS Fluent for batch crystallization.
Ultimately, controller structures with a working tomography-based feedback loop have been achieved for all four demonstrations. Several factors enabled this, including artificial intelligence methods (machine learning, neural networks) for tomography data processing and advanced system identification methods applied to large sets of experimental data from the demonstration processes.
The research results and findings have been published in a significant number of impactful scientific publications in high-ranking scientific journals such as MDPI Sensors, IEEE Access, Flow Measurement and Instrumentation, Physical Review E, Chemical Engineering Research and Design, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation etc. On average, each ESR published 4,7 journal articles as the main or co-author. The ESRs also presented their research results and findings at renowned international conferences and workshops such as VINCI 2019, EuCAP 2020, the IEEE Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference (APMC 2020), SteelSim 2021, AMPERE 2021, amongst others. On average, each ESR participated in 3,4 conferences/workshops during the research programme.
Furthermore, the training programme that was designed and delivered to the ESRs contained four internal workshops, three summer schools, the Final TOMOCON Symposium and in total over 60 secondments to academic and industrial partners, as well as local training all in line with the technical and transferable/soft skills needs.
The latest research results and findings were also published on the TOMOCON Website, in press releases and articles and on the TOMOCON channels on the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Youtube.
