Manifold regularized deep canonical variate analysis with interpretable attribute guidance for three-phase flow process monitoring

Abstract

Oil–gas–water three-phase flow has multiple flow states, exhibiting dynamic, nonlinear, and instantaneous behaviors. Monitoring and analysis of flow state are crucial for ensuring safe operation of industrial processes. However, the absence of a universal definition for three-phase flow states, owing to the complex flow characteristics and structures, leads to that labeling three-phase flow states by categories is impractical. For comprehensive monitoring and analysis, the flow states should be described from both global (e.g., the dominant phase) and local (e.g., the interphase structure) aspects. Given the aforementioned challenges, the work aims to address the accurate identification of typical three-phase flow states and to meticulously monitor and analyze the continuous evolutionary process of three-phase flow. To achieve it, the manifold regularized deep canonical variate analysis with attribute guidance (Ag-MRDCVA) is proposed, which not only introduces an innovative monitoring paradigm that designs state attributes for process description but also facilitates knowledge transfer from typical flow states to transition states. For enhancing the model’s feature embedding capabilities, an attribute guidance module is introduced to increase supervision information at both class and attribute levels. Then, convolutional neural network (CNN) backbones are developed with a dual objective of global serial correlation and local manifold regularization, which capture spatiotemporal information at both global and local scales, facilitating effective attribute encoding and characterization of flow states. Finally, the attribute evolution heat map and a monitoring metric (MM) collectively offer a compelling and comprehensive analysis of the three-phase flow process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ag-MRDCVA surpasses existing methods, showcasing its ability to minutely monitor the process while providing reasonable explanations.