Precise volume fraction measurement for three-phase flow meter using 137Cs gamma source and one detector

Abstract

Abstract The ability to precisely predict the volume fraction percentage of the different phases flowing in a pipe plays an important role in the oil, petroleum and other industries. In this research, the volume fraction percentage was measured precisely in water-gasoil-air three-phase flows by using a single pencil beam gamma ray attenuation technique and multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network. The volume fraction percentage determination in three-phase flows requires least two gamma radioactive sources with different energies while in this study, we used just a 137Cs source (with the single energy of 662 keV) and a NaI detector. Also, in this work, the MLP neural network in MATLAB software was implemented to predict the volume fraction percentage. The experimental setup provides the required data for training and testing the network. Using this proposed method, the volume fraction was predicted in water-gasoil-air three-phase flows with mean relative error percentage less than 6.95 %. Also, the root mean square error was calculated 2.60. The set-up used is simpler than other proposed methods and cost, radiation safety and shielding requirements are minimized.