A Deep Branch-Aggregation Network for Recognition of Gas–Liquid Two-Phase Flow Structure

Gas-liquid two-phase flow widely exists in petroleum, natural gas, and other industries. Recognition of flow structure is an important issue in the study of two-phase flow, and it is of great significance for the optimization of industrial processes. Therefore, how to recognize complex flow structures effectively represents a challenge. To cope with this problem, we develop a novel deep learning network to recognize flow structures under different flow conditions. In particular, we conduct vertical upward gas-liquid two-phase flow experiments to obtain the flow structure data set on the basis of images collected by a high-speed camera. Then, we design a branch-aggregation network (BAN), where the branch structure is utilized to increase the width of the network, and multilevel aggregation structure is used to fuse features of different levels. In recognition of flow structure, the proposed network achieves an accuracy of 99.60% with a fast convergence speed and shows the advantages in antinoise ability, which is significant for online recognition in industrial processes. The results indicate that BAN can be a feasible method to recognize complex flow structures.