LAUSR

Abstract Computer tomography (CT) is a useful probe to measure two-phase flow parameters. Because of the dynamic characteristic of the two-phase flow, the high temporal CT is required. A compact CT system, consists of seven isotope γ-ray sources, seven groups of cadmium zinc telluride (CdZnTe) detectors and collimators, is proposed. The 241Am is selected as the source by balancing its ability to distinguish water and air and transmission power for the acrylic pipeline. The virtual pixels are interpolated to increase the number of projections from Monte Carlo simulation. The reconstruction accuracy and speed for different phantoms with maximum likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM), Tikhonov regularization, total variation (TV) regularization and genetic algorithm (GA) are compared. The results show TV algorithm achieves a good balance between accuracy and speed, and GA has the highest accuracy but lowest speed in high spatial resolution reconstruction. The temporal resolution can be increased by sacrificing the spatial resolution.