Target-Dependent Chemical Species Tomography with Hybrid Meshing of Sensing Regions

This paper develops a hybrid-size meshing scheme for target-dependent imaging in Chemical Species Tomography (CST). The traditional implementation of CST generally places the target field in the central region of laser sensing, the so-called Region of Interest (RoI), with uniform-size meshes. The centre of the RoI locates at the midpoint between the laser emitters and receivers, while the size of the RoI is empirically determined by the optical layout. A too small RoI cannot make the most use of laser beams, while a too large one leads to much severer rank deficiency in CST. To solve the above-mentioned issues, we introduce hybrid-size meshing, for the first time, by reforming the density of the pixels in the entire sensing region of CST. This development alleviates the ill-posedness of the CST inverse problem by detailing the target flow field with dense pixels in the RoI and fully considering the complete physical absorption model with sparse pixels out of the RoI. The proposed scheme was both numerically and experimentally validated using a CST sensor with 32 laser beams using a variety of computational tomographic algorithms. The images reconstructed using the hybrid-size meshing scheme show better accuracy and finer profile of the target flow, compared with those reconstructed using the traditionally uniform-size meshing. The proposed hybrid-size meshing scheme significantly facilitates the industrial application of CST towards practical combustors, in which the combustion zone is bypassed by cooling air. In these scenarios, the proposed scheme can better characterise the combustion zone with dense meshes, while maintaining the integrity of the physical model by considering the absorption in the bypass air with sparse meshes.