The paper presents a review of current achievements in the Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) in relation to its possible applications in the study of phenomena occurring in fluidised bed reactors. Reactors of that kind are being increasingly used in chemical engineering, energetics (fluidised bed boilers) or industrial dryers. However, not all phenomena in the fluidised bed have been thoroughly understood. This results in the need to explore and develop new research methods. Various aspects of ECT operation and data processing are described with their applicability in scientific research. The idea for investigation of temperature distribution in the fluidised bed, using multimodal tomography, is also introduced. Metrological requirements of process tomography such as sensitivity, resolution, and speed of data acquiring are noted.
The paper presents the method of on-line diagnostics of the bed temperature controller for the fluidized bed boiler. Proposed solution is based on the methods of statistical process control. Detected decrease of the bed temperature control quality is used to activate the controller self-tuning procedure. The algorithm that provides optimal tuning of the bed temperature controller is also proposed. The results of experimental verification of the presented method is attached. Experimental studies were carried out using the 2 MW bubbling fluidized bed boiler.