Gas–Liquid Two-Phase Flow Velocity Measurement With Continuous Wave Ultrasonic Doppler and Conductance Sensor

Abstract

Flow velocity is an important process parameter that quantifies the volume or mass flow rate as well as monitors the process safety. To nonintrusively measure the flow velocity of horizontal gas–liquid two-phase flow, an ultrasonic Doppler sensor and a conductance sensor with dedicated measurement models are presented. The air superficial flow velocity can be directly obtained and the water superficial flow velocity can be calculated through a two-fluid model for bubble flow and plug flow. For slug flow, a correlation between the phase velocity in slug body and overall superficial flow velocity was built based on a slug closure model. In order to eliminate the influence of the changing velocity profile in the fluid, the sample volume was designed to cover the whole pipe cross section by installing a two-chip piezoelectric transducer with 1-MHz center frequency at the bottom of the pipe. The conductance sensor provided water holdup estimate to compensate the velocity measurement model. Experiments were carried out in a 50-mm inner diameter pipe to verify the proposed sensor and model. Three flow patterns (bubble flow, plug flow, and slug flow) were generated by adjusting the inlet flow rate of the air and the water. The results show that the mean relative error can achieve within 5%.