The wire-mesh sensor as a two-phase flow meter

Abstract

A novel gas and liquid flow rate measurement method is proposed for use in vertical upward and downward gas-liquid pipe flows. This method is based on the analysis of the time history of area-averaged void fraction that is measured using a conductivity wire-mesh sensor (WMS). WMS measurements were collected in vertical upward and downward air-water flows in a pipe with an internal diameter of 32.5 mm at nearly atmospheric pressure. The relative frequencies and the power spectral density of area-averaged void fraction were calculated and used as representative properties. Independent features, extracted from these properties using Principal Component Analysis and Independent Component Analysis, were used as inputs to artificial neural networks, which were trained to give the gas and liquid flow rates as outputs. The present method was shown to be accurate for all four encountered flow regimes and for a wide range of flow conditions. Besides providing accurate predictions for steady flows, the method was also tested successfully in three flows with transient liquid flow rates. The method was augmented by the use of the cross-correlation function of area-averaged void fraction determined from the output of a dual WMS unit as an additional representative property, which was found to improve the accuracy of flow rate prediction.

Inference of Gas-liquid Flowrate using Neural Networks

“…Shaban and Tavoularis used differential pressure signals to infer the superficial gas and liquid velocities using an ANN [19]. Shaban and Tavoularis used the same experimental facility, but instead using WMS, to achieve the same objective using an ANN [20]. In both their studies, Shaban and Tavoularis classify the signals by first post-processing the measured time history into few (≈ 10) features and then use two independent ANNs for predicting the superficial gas and liquid velocities separately (v g , v f , respectively).…”

Developments for the application of the Wire-Mesh Sensor in industries

“…However comparative studies with non-invasive measurement techniques showed good agreement of experimental data ( Azzopardi et al, 2010 ), ( Prasser et al, 2005 ). In the past, Wire-Mesh Sensors are adopted as measuring technique for many research applications ( Vieira, 2014 ), ( Ofuchi et al, 2010 ), ( Shaban and Tavoularis, 2015 ). Currently, its application to industry is restricted due to the offline data processing procedure.…”

“…With this method the characteristic shape of the PDF's is transferred to a two-dimensional map, where clusters can be identified to the flow regimes respectively. They also applied this algorithm on void fraction calculated from Wire-Mesh Sensor data ( Shaban and Tavoularis, 2015 ).…”

Characterizing the correlations between local phase fractions of gas–liquid two-phase flow with wire-mesh sensor

“…For instance, gas-liquid bubbly flows have been studied in [12,13]; they found that the bubble break-up rate increased with bubble velocity, but the bubble deceleration did not depend on the bubble velocity. For flow pattern studies, the feature-based flow pattern analysis was conducted by using either average phase fraction or local phase fraction [12,14].…”