Design of capacitance sensor for two phase flow monitoring based on finite element models

Abstract

Monitoring water-oil two-phase flow is of great industrial significance. In this work, an electrical capacitance sensor was designed and tested to monitor the two-phase flow. In order to optimise the capacitance sensor for two-phase flow monitoring, it is necessary to analyse capacitance sensors with different geometries. In this paper, the capacitance sensors with concave plates, double ring electrodes, helical electrodes, parallel strips and perpendicular strips are proposed and briefly introduced. The Finite Element (FE) models for capacitance sensors were constructed in COMSOL Multiphysics, and the preliminary experiments were carried out. Both simulation and experimental results show that the capacitance of the sensor tends to increase with the decreased oil content. The measurement sensitivity distributions obtained from FE models vary with different electrode geometries, based on which design parameters can then be selected to address different requirements.