Emission and transmission tomography system applied to analyze industrial process inside chemical reactors

Abstract

The tomography techniques are widely used in many industries, such as: chemical, food, pharmaceutical and oil sectors. In the industries the tomography is used to diagnose the state of the machines of production and also in the control of quality of the produced objects. A portable tomography system known as instant-non-scanning type, a similar version of the fourth generation CT, was developed in this work. It is capable to obtain measurements in real time conditions without interrupting the operation of the industrial production and it is useful in the quality control of the means of production and the objects produced. This paper describes an innovative hybrid industrial tomographic system, i.e., simultaneous data from the emission of an internal radioactive source introduced inside to the object (67Ga citrate) and tomographic transmission using five sources of 137Cs positioned externally to the object which are distributed at the vertices of a pentagon. The tomographic system described here is useful for studying dynamic chemical phenomena, associated or not with multiphase systems commonly found in chemical reactors and distillation columns.