Experimental Studies on the Measurement of Oil-water Two-phase Flow

Abstract

Oil‐water two‐phase flow measurement was investigated with a Venturi meter and double‐U Coriolis meter in this work. Based on the Venturi differential pressure and the quality of two‐phase flow, a model for measuring oil‐water mass flow rate was developed, in which fluid asymmetry of oil‐water two‐phase flow was considered. However, measuring the quality of two‐phase flow on‐line is rather difficult at present. Though double‐U Coriolis meter can provide accurate measurement of two‐phase flow, it can not provide desired respective mass flow rate. Therefore, a double‐parameter measurement method with Venturi meter and double‐U Coriolis meter is proposed. According to the flow rate requirement of Venturi, a new flow regime identification method based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been developed for the separated flow and the dispersed flow. With the Venturi model developed in this paper and mass flow rate of oil‐water mixture measured with double‐U Coriolis meter, mixture mass flow rate, oil mass flow rate and water mass flow rate could be obtained by the correlation. Experiments of flow rate measurement of oil‐water two‐phase flow were carried out in the horizontal tube with 25mm inner diameter. The water fraction range is from 5% to 95%. Experimental results showed that the flow regime could be identified well with SVM, and the relative error of the total mass flow rate and respective mass flow rate of oil‐water two‐phase flow was less than ±1.5% and ±10%, respectively.