Patent ID: 8762084

Claim:
An apparatus for electronic capacitance tomography, the apparatus comprising: source and receiver electrodes capacitively coupled together in an arrangement to measure a spatial distribution of a substance within capacitive distance of at least one pair of source and receiver electrodes; an excitation module coupled to the source electrodes, the excitation module configured to excite sequentially a plurality of sets of source and receiver electrode pairs, wherein exciting a given set of the plurality of sets includes exciting simultaneously each source and receiver electrode pair of the given set with a different excitation signal, the different excitation signal being a voltage, the excitation module further configured to excite sequentially the plurality of the sets of source and receiver electrode pairs by exciting a set of source and receiver electrode pair and sequentially increasing a number of source electrodes for each subsequent sets of source and receiver electrode pairs of the plurality of sets of electrodes; and a measurement module coupled to the receiver electrodes, the measurement module configured to measure simultaneously capacitance between each source and receiver electrode pair by measuring a current, the measured capacitances representing the spatial distribution of the substance.