Improvement of spatial sensitivity of an electrostatic sensor for particle flow measurement

The ring-shaped electrostatic sensor is a typical particulate flow measurement system, which suffers from flow profile dependency due to its non-uniform spatial sensitivity. In this paper, a method based on sensor’s output power frequency spectrum is proposed, which can be realized by repeatedly decomposing the sensor’s overall output power spectrum to identify elementary frequency spectra corresponding to equivalent flow streams. The decomposed components can then be re-weighed to improve the uniformity of spatial sensitivity. This is a low cost approach, and there is no need to modify simple structure of the current sensor.