An alternative excitation method for electrical impedance tomography

Abstract

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) can be utilized to image the conductivity distribution of material under test. The EIT measurements depend on the quality in the current injection and voltage measuring circuits. The current source plays a vital role in the EIT instruments. In most of the research studies, the push–pull current sources were employed for the source and sink signal generation. It usually requires frequent calibration to achieve proper functioning, especially for the sweeping frequency measurements. In this paper, an alternative excitation method has been proposed for simplifying the design of the current source in EIT instruments, which aims to achieve the performance of the push–pull current source by using a single-ended current source. It could offer the following advantages: (1) hardware simplification and (2) reduced requirements on current source calibration. The corrected measurements could be consistent with that using push–pull excitation, as confirmed by the numerical simulations. In addition, the reconstructed images have also been investigated to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.