Phase Distribution Measurement of Liquid–Solid Media Using Multimode Ultrasound

Abstract

Ultrasound tomography (UT) is an emerging technique for phase distribution measurement in industrial multiphase flow monitoring. A multimode UT combining the ultrasound transmission and reflection modes is proposed to measure stratified phase distribution and sound speed of liquid–solid mixtures in the horizontal pipe. First, the acoustic attenuation is used to reconstruct the phase distribution with a modified matrix regularization algorithm, and the time-of-flight (TOF) of ultrasound is used to extract the boundary of multiphase layers with the weight Akaike information criterion algorithm. Second, a wavelet fusion method based on the principal component averaging is proposed to fuse the reconstruction images of UT transmission and reflection. Third, numerical investigations are carried out to validate the feasibility of the proposed method. According to the quantitative indexes, the proposed method can effectively reconstruct the phase distribution of multiphase media. Finally, an experimental test pipeline Section is established, and sand–water and oil–water–sand liquid–solid media are investigated. The minimum relative error (RE) and the maximum correlation coefficient (CC) of experimental fusion results can reach 0.33 and 0.94, respectively, and the average measurement error (ME) of the layer height is 3.80%.