Investigation of pressurized gas-liquid two-phase flow with electrical capacitance tomography

This paper presents a study of flow pattern identification and gas void fraction (GVF) measurement of a pressurized gas-liquid two-phase flow using electrical capacitance tomography (ECT). The pressurized gas-liquid flow is typical in many industrial processes, such as the natural gas extraction and transportation. An ECT sensor is designed for on-line monitoring and GVF measurement of gas-liquid two-phase flow in a high pressure pipeline. The linear back-projection (LBP) algorithm is used for real-time image reconstruction. Three approaches are introduced to calculate GVF, including pixel summation, average capacitance and opposite capacitance. The flow patterns identified by ECT are mainly wavy stratified and annular flow, which is in good agreement with the result of Taitel-Duckler flow pattern map. The trend of GVF measured by pixel summation and average capacitance is basically the same.