Performance evaluation of advanced industrial SPECT system with diverging collimator.

An advanced industrial SPECT system with 12-fold-array diverging collimator was developed for flow visualization in industrial reactors and was discussed in the previous study. The present paper describes performance evaluation of the SPECT system under both static- and dynamic- flow conditions. Under static conditions, the movement of radiotracer inside the test reactor was compared with that of color tracer (blue ink) captured with a high-speed camera. The comparison of the reconstructed images obtained with the radiotracer and the SPECT system showed fairly good agreement with video-frames of the color tracer obtained with the camera. Based on the results of the performance evaluation, it is concluded that the SPECT system is suitable for investigation and visualization of flows in industrial flow reactors.

Development of advanced industrial SPECT system with 12-gonal diverging-collimator.

Industrial single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a promising diagnosis technique to investigate the dynamic behavior of process media. In the present study, a 12-gonal industrial SPECT system was developed using diverging collimators, and its performance was compared with those of hexagonal and 24-gonal systems. Of all of the systems, the 12-gonal type showed the best performance, providing (1) a detection-efficiency map without edge artifacts, (2) the best image resolution, and (3) reconstruction images that correctly furnish multi-source information. Based on the performance of the three different types of configurations, a SPECT system with 12-gonal type configuration was found most suitable for investigating and visualization of flow dynamics in industrial process systems.

Study on the validation of the computer fluid dynamics modeling for a continuously flowing water vessel with the industrial SPECT using a radiotracer.

The industrial Single Photon Emission Computerized Tomography (SPECT) system comprised of 30 sets of lead collimated 2 in. NaI(Tl) detectors was built and utilized for measuring the spatial distribution of radiotracers as a function of time at a predefined cross-sectional level of a tank with a diameter of 300 mm and a height of 780 mm. In a stable flow condition, a radiotracer was injected into the upstream of a tank and then the measurement data were processed for the two dimensional concentration mapping of the radiotracers with a time step of 1s. The images were compared with numerical simulation results obtained from the Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling that has been incorporated with several different kinds of turbulence models. The comparison shows one model gives a better result than any others in terms of the similarity of the radiotracer distribution pattern. This study demonstrates the significant possibility of industrial SPECT technology for visualizing flow characteristics in a multi-dimensional way and for validating the CFD modeling.