Industrial process imaging
Industrial process imaging, or industrial process tomography or process tomography are methods used to form an image of a cross-section of vessel or pipe in a chemical engineering or mineral processing, or petroleum extraction or refining plant. Although such techniques are not in widespread deployment in industrial plant there is an active research community, including a Virtual Center for industrial Process Tomography, and a regular World Congress on Industrial Process Tomography, now organized by a learned society for this area, the "International Society for Industrial Process Tomography" A number of applications of tomography of process equipment  were described in the 1970s, using Ionising Radiation from X-ray or isotope sources but routine use was limited by the high cost involved and safety constraints. Radiation-based methods used long exposure times which meant that dynamic measurements of the real-time behaviour of process systems were not feasible. The use of electrical methods to image industrial processes was pioneered by Maurice Beck at the UMIST in the mid-1980s