A study of oil–water two-phase flow pattern recognition based on thermal sensors

Abstract

To understand the flow characteristics and kinetic modelling of oil–water two-phase flow(OWTPF), this paper employs thermal array sensors to identify the flow pattern (FP) in OWTPF horizontal pipelines. Firstly, the thermal array sensor installation was constructed. Secondly, the time-varying characteristics of multi-feature signals were qualitatively analyzed using the adaptive optimal kernel time–frequency representation (AOK-TFR) method and unthresholded recurrence plot (URP) method. Finally, the sparrow search algorithm-support vector machine (SSA-SVM) machine learning algorithm is used for quantitative prediction of multi-feature classification, which leads to high prediction accuracy. The experiment proves that the correct rate of the thermal method in recognizing six types of OWTPF is above 91%, the correct rate of five types of flow is above 97.33%. This paper adopts the thermal method to identify the multiphase FP, which is a major innovation in this paper and also lays the foundation for recognizing the flow characteristics of multiphase flow.