ERT Investigation on Horizontal and Vertical Counter-gravity Slurry Flow in Pipelines

Abstract

Abstract The occurrence of separation and slippage of the two phases in settling solid-liquid flow in pipelines make the flow unpredictable and time dependent. Therefore it is paramount for the operator of slurry pipelines to monitor and measure the flow continuously, particularly from the local point of view. This paper reports the laboratory experiments carried out on an open flow loop and the use of Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) to interrogate the internal structure of horizontal and vertical counter-gravity slurry flow. The use of high performance dual-plane ERT system, which is called Fast Impedance Camera System (FICA), is attempted for fast impedance measurement of the media with a temporal resolution up to 1000 dual-frames per second (dfps). The internal images of the pipeline are captured along with the measurement of solids volumetric concentration for both orientations, while the dualplane ERT is combined with cross-correlation technique to estimate axial solids velocity distribution. A set of experiments was carried out on coarse and medium sand-water slurry flow with 2% and 10% throughput volumetric concentration and the transport velocity range of 1.5-5 m/s. A flow diversion technique was used for validation of mean local solids concentration and solids axial velocity obtained from the ERT.