Miniature planar 3D ECT sensor based on distributed electrode arrangement

Abstract

Due to the low sensitivity in the middle of sensing chamber of planar peripheral electrode arrangement tomography system, a miniature planar electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) sensor with distributed electrode arrangement is proposed for imaging of 3D cultivated cells. In this work, the 3D imaging capability of the proposed sensor was compared to the peripheral electrode arrangement ECT sensor through numerical simulation of the sensitivity maps. The analysis of the sensitivity maps revealed that the sensitivity distribution of proposed sensor covered the entire surface of the sensing chamber which indicated improved sensitivity coverage in the sensing chamber. In addition, the axial resolution and the singular value decomposition (SVD) analysis of the sensitivity maps demonstrated that the proposed sensor has better 3D imaging capability. Then, the proposed sensor composed of nine electrodes, a thin PDMS layer and a glass coverslip was fabricated and investigated. The experimental results showed that the reconstructed 3D image by the proposed sensor was consistent at all the test positions. In contrast to the planar peripheral electrode arrangement ECT sensor that has an average correlation coefficient (CC) of 0.4571, the proposed sensor achieved a higher average CC of 0.5454, indicating better 3D imaging performance.