Complex Network Analysis of Wire-Mesh Sensor Measurements for Characterizing Vertical Gas–Liquid Two-Phase Flows

Abstract

Gas–liquid two-phase flows widely exist in industrial production, where understanding the dynamics underlying flow patterns is a challenging problem of great significance. In this brief, we propose a complex network framework for analyzing the wire-mesh sensor measurements, aiming to characterize the flow behavior in the transition from bubble flow to slug flow in a 50 mm-inner-diameter vertical pipe. In particular, we design a wire-mesh sensor system and carry out the gas–liquid two-phase flow experiments to acquire the local flow signals from different flow conditions. We infer a complex network from wire-mesh sensor measurements in terms of the mutual information between time series, and then calculate some network measures to quantitatively characterize the network topological features associated with flow behavior. We find that the networks corresponding to different flow patterns show different topological features, which allows us to characterize the transition of flow behavior. Our results suggest that the proposed analytical framework can effectively reveal the complex dynamical behavior of gas–liquid two-phase flows.