Comparison between wire-mesh sensor and ultra-fast X-ray tomograph for an air–water flow in a vertical pipe

Abstract

A comparison between ultra-fast X-ray CT and a wire-mesh sensor is presented. The measurements were carried out in a vertical pipe of 42 mm inner diameter, which was supplied with an air–water mixture. Both gas and liquid superficial velocities were varied. The X-ray CT delivered 263 frames per second, while the wire-mesh sensor was operated at a frequency four times higher. Two different gas injectors were used: four orifices of 5 mm diameter for creating large bubbles and gas plugs and a sintered plate with a pore size of 100 μm for generating a bubbly flow. It was found that the wire-mesh sensor has a significantly higher resolution than the X-ray CT. Small bubbles, which are clearly shown by the wire-mesh sensor, cannot be found in the CT images, because they cross the measuring plane before a complete scan can be performed. This causes artifacts in the reconstructed images, instead. Furthermore, there are large deviations between the quantitative information contained in the reconstructed tomographic 2D distributions and the gas fractions measured by the sensor, while the agreement is very good when the gas fraction is obtained by a direct evaluation of the X-ray attenuation along the available through-transmission chords of the tomography set-up. This shows that there is still potential for an improvement of the image reconstruction method. Concerning the wire-mesh sensor it was found that the gas fraction inside large bubbles is slightly underestimated. Furthermore, a significant distortion of large Taylor bubbles by the sensor was found for small liquid velocities up to 0.24 m/s. This effect vanished with growing superficial water velocity.