Special issue on the 10th world congress on industrial process tomography

This Special Feature provides a cross-section of measurement innovation from the International Society for Industrial Process Tomography (ISIPT) 10th World Congress in industrial Process Tomography (WCIPT). Although scheduled for September 2020 this was postponed by one year due to the Covid pandemic and held as a Global, Virtual event in September 2021. The scope of the WCIPT is to share innovative and radical advances in 3 themes: (A) tomographic (and related) measurement in industrial processes; (B) transformational enhancements to existing methods, and (C) application case studies for new areas and processes. The 10th WCIPT also celebrated 20 + years of WCIPT reporting of global developments in Industrial Process Tomography (IPT), and 30 + years since its inception as a viable process measurement technology. Early research focussed on basic concepts. A landmark project c1990 created the first real-time instrument able to operate at a viable resolution and frame rate ( ∼ 100 fps) for an oil/gas pipeline flow, and interpret resulting cross-sectional data to derive flow rates. This integrated electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) sensing (from University of Manchester, UK) with 16 element parallel-processing for data-acquisition, reconstruction and interpretation (from University of Leeds, UK) [1]. Proving trials on a large inclinable flow-loop at a Schlumberger laboratory demonstrated viability within accuracy bounds of the integral plant instrumentation. This 1st generation (fixed excitation mode and energy/frequency) ECT design was commercialised and widely deployed. It was followed by an analogous electrical resistance tomography (ERT) sensing design, deploying early microcomputer processing, suited to slower processes such as stirred tank mixers; also commercialised c1995 as the first of a range of now globally deployed ERT products. IPT addresses a wide range of processes. Unlike medical tomography, internal images