Investigation of a bubble detector based on active electrolocation of weakly electric fish

Abstract

Weakly electric fish employ active electrolocation for navigation and object detection. They emit an electric signal with their electric organ in the tail and sense the electric field with electroreceptors that are distributed over their skin. We adopted this principle to design a bubble detector that can detect gas bubbles in a fluid or, in principle, objects with different electric conductivity than the surrounding fluid. The evaluation of the influence of electrode diameter on detecting a given bubble size showed that the signal increases with electrode diameter. Therefore it appears that this detector will be more appropriate for large sized applications such as bubble columns than small sized applications such as bubble detectors in dialysis.