Combined Finite Element and Electronic Circuit Model of a Wire-Mesh Sensor

A new wire-mesh sensor model based on electric field and circuit simulations is presented. In our approach, the excitation and amplification stages of the capacitance WMS are created as macromodels and coupled to the electrodes of a 3D geometry of the sensor. Thus, the effects caused by nonideal characteristics of the amplifiers are considered (e.g. finite open-loop gain and bandwidth). In order to evaluate the performance of the model, a static validation based on phantom measurement was performed. The phantoms were created with paraffin to emulate typical flow regimes, i.e. annular, slug and bubble flow. A mapping containing the position and the electrical properties of the patterns was obtained by image processing and incorporated to the field simulation. Hence the numerical simulations could be directly compared to the experimental data. The results show that coupling the external circuits to the capacitance WMS model is crucial to provide reliable synthetic data.