The paper reviews the background limitations of ultrasonic process tomography which impinge upon real-time performance : the complex sound field sensed by transducers often resulting in overlapped, or multiple reflected pulses which introduce errors; and the inherent slow propagation speed of ultrasound. A novel spectral analysis strategy is presented, which examines the phase information of transducer signals enabling the location of overlapping pulses. This is illustrated using a computer simulation which indicates that real-time data acquisition performance can be improved through a reduction in the number of transducers employed, and further has the potential to allow multiple transducers to transmit simultaneously.