Flowrate measurement of air-water two-phase flow using an Electrical Resistance Tomography sensor and a Venturi meter

A flowrate measurement method for air-water two-phase flow is developed using an Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) sensor and a Venturi meter. With the conductance values measured by the ERT sensor, the real-time flow pattern is identified and the voidage is also calculated. The Butterworth correlation is applied to calculate the mass quality from the voidage value, and then six Venturi measurement correlations are introduced to predict the mass flowrate of two-phase flow. The flow pattern classifier is constructed by using the Partial Least Square (PLS) method and the Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) classification method. The voidage measurement models are developed by using the PLS method and the LS-SVM regression method for different flow patterns. Experiment results verify that this measurement method is effective. The research work also shows that among the six Venturi measurement correlations the Collins correlation always performs the best for the flow condition in this work.