Application of electrical resistance tomography to two-phase pipe flow parameters measurement

This paper introduces the TERT-IV prototype developed by Tianjin University. The application of the TERT-IV system to measurement parameters of two-phase flow has been studied. The methods of analyzing measured data of ERT system are presented and applied to identify flow regimes and estimate void fraction. For the several typical flow regimes, the methods of principal component analysis and artificial neural network to identify the two-phase flow regimes is presented, and that is proved to have higher recognition rate by experimental test. For the different phase distribution on a pipe cross-section, the methods of relative changes summation and polynomial regression are used to estimate void fraction, and are proved to be possible by comparing the results of simulation calculation to the analytic results of experimental measured data. The research results show that the method is feasible using feature extraction and analysis data to measure the parameters of two-phase flow under the different flow conditions, and prove that it is possible to monitor on-line the transportation process of air/water two-phase flow using ERT system. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.