A new approach to the fast X-ray computed tomography (XCT) technique was proposed for the transient measurement of multiphase flow where the local phase concentration can be simplified to have binary values such as in a gas bubbling systemLimited projection data from a few view angles around an object were measured/simulated instantaneously for binary image reconstructionAn improved genetic algorithm (GA) incorporated with the prior understanding on the essential physics of the above-mentioned systems was established to solve the ill-posed mathematical problem of the proposed CT technique

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an optimization problemSuch approach was expected to maintain the high spatial resolution of a CT measurement and at the same time to facilitate the high temporal resolution

with much less cost than a conventional medical CT.Numerical simulations were carried out to simulate the physical measurement of gas-liquid bubbling systems by using the established genetic algorithm based fast X-ray computed tomographic method(GA-XCT)A large amount of simulations demonstrated the feasibility and strong capability of the new method in the application of “bubbles” reconstruction using just a few angles of projection dataGA-XCT also showed much better performance than the conventional CT reconstruction algorithm when dealing with the limited data tomographyMeanwhile

the GA based image reconstruction was robust to the noise

and not dependent on the bubble shapes.