A simple and inexpensive design for volume fraction prediction in three-phase flow meter: Single source-single detector

Abstract

The problem of how to correctly predict the volume fraction in three-phase flows in sensitive operational conditions is an important parameter in the oil and petroleum industry. This research presents a new methodology for volume fraction percentage prediction in water-gasoil-air multiphase systems based on transmitted gamma ray method and multilayer perceptron (MLP). The detection system uses an appropriate single source-single detector set-up, consists of a dual-energy gamma-ray source and one NaI(Tl) detector. The experimental setup provides the required data for training and testing the network. Using this proposed method, the volume fraction was predicted in water-gasoil-air three-phase flows with mean relative error percentage (MRE%) less than 4.64% and root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.49. MER% quantities for each phase of water, gasoil and air were calculated 3.72, 4.54 and 5.65, respectively. Also, the RMSE quantities were measured 0.79, 1.46 and 1.98 for water, gasoil and air, respectively. The results revealed that a good agreement is between the predicted volume fraction percentage and actual data due to the comparison of the performance of the proposed method (MLP) and the relationship derived from empirical data. The old systems used were adequately complicated whereas the new design is certainly very simple. Also, radiation safety and shielding conditions ans electronic requirements are optimized. So the cost is minimized as low as possible.