Two Methods for Measurement of Gas-Liquid Flows in Vertical Upward Pipe Using Dual-Plane ERT System

In modern industrial processes, the accurate measurement of two-phase flow is an important task. Process tomography can provide a distribution information of a two-phase pipe flow. In order to carry out instantaneous flowrate measurements of the gas-liquid two-phase flow in a vertical upward pipe, a dual-plane electrical-resistance-tomography (ERT) system is combined with a cross-correlation technique to measure the gas-liquid two-phase flow, in which the continuous phase is a conductive liquid. A pixel correlation method and a feature-value-correlation method are applied to estimate the disperse-phase velocity. Two methods are used to estimate the local void fraction and the disperse velocity distribution by reconstructing the image pixel gray value distribution. Estimates of the mean void fraction and the disperse-phase mean velocity are obtained by extracting the feature value of the measured data at the dual-plane ERT boundary. The variation in the disperse-phase distribution with changes in time is considered, and the estimated values for both the disperse-phase void fraction and velocity have been experimentally obtained, which are used in the calculation of the instantaneous flowrate. The air-water two-phase flow experiments are designed to evaluate the validity of the two methods used in estimation. The experimental results agree with the theoretical methods for obtaining the disperse-phase velocity and instantaneous-flowrate measurement in the vertical upward pipe.