An Opportunistic Approach for Mitigating Fouling in the Measurement of Oil Thickness

This paper presents a novel method for characterizing the distribution of a multiphase gas/liquid mixture under dynamic conditions. The main advantage of the proposed technique is its ability to leverage sensor motion information to correct measurement errors. The proposed method is applied to the measurement of oil thickness within a gas/oil/water mixture. Testing is performed using the output signal of a planar capacitive sensor array that uses a discrete sensing technique to estimate the oil thickness. Laboratory experiments showed that the proposed method reduced the error in the thickness measurement caused by fouling and random noise.