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 meshes in the entire region of laser sensing, with dense ones in the RoI to detail the target flow field and sparse ones out of the RoI to fully consider the physically existing laser absorption. The proposed scheme was both numerically and experimentally validated using a CST sensor with 32 laser beams. 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.