Gas-water two-phase flow pattern recognition based on ERT and ultrasound Doppler

Two phase flow is widely encountered and of high importance in the manufacturing process and related scientific research. The two-phase flow process is complex, and the flow patterns are jointly determined by the phase fraction and the flow rate. The traditional way of studying the flow patterns uses a single sensor, generally sensing one point, to discover and identify the flow patterns. However, these methods lack a comprehensive description from both the phase distribution and flow velocity. Therefore, it is essential to fuse different detection mechanism sensors to investigate the flow patterns in a more comprehensive way. In this work, an electrical resistance tomography (ERT) sensor measures phase fraction and a continuous wave ultrasound Doppler (CWUD) sensor measures velocity of two-phase flow. For the measurement, data of ERT is treated as a multivariate time-series and a method of graph signal processing named Modular Dirichlet Energy (MDE) is adopted to extract features. The results show that the combination of these two sensors can distinguish horizontal gas-water flow well and lays the foundation for the identification of oil-gas-water three-phase flow.