A New Contactless Bubble/Slug Velocity Measurement Method of Gas–Liquid Two-Phase Flow in Small Channels

A new contactless bubble/slug velocity measurement method of the gas-liquid two-phase flow in small channels is proposed by extending the contactless conductivity detection technique to the contactless impedance detection (CID) technique. Two kinds of CID sensors with different constructions (tubular construction and radial construction) are developed to obtain the total impedance information (the real part, the imaginary part, and the amplitude) of the gas-liquid two-phase flow. Two bubble/slug velocity measurement systems with different constructions, the tubular three-electrode velocity measurement system and the radial four-electrode velocity measurement system, are developed. With the obtained total impedance information, three initial estimation values of the bubble/slug velocity are determined by the principle of the cross correlation velocity measurement. Then, with the real-time flow pattern identification result implemented by the fuzzy C-means, a corresponding velocity measurement model [which is the linear combination of the three initial estimation values of the bubble/slug velocity and is developed by the penalty function method and the Davidon-Fletcher-Powell algorithm] is applied to obtain the final bubble/slug velocity. Two groups of the bubble/slug velocity measurement system prototypes with three different inner diameters are developed. The bubble/slug velocity measurement experiments are carried out. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective. For the two bubble/slug velocity measurement systems with different constructions, the maximum relative errors of the bubble/slug velocity measurement are all less than 4.5%. The research results also indicate that making full use of the total impedance information is an effective approach to improve the accuracy of the velocity measurement.

I. Introduction

Gas–liquid two-phase flow is an important kind of multiphase flows [1]–[6]. In the past decades, due to the advantages of high mass and heat transfer performance of small channels, the studies and applications of the gas–liquid two-phase flow in small channels have received more and more attention in many industrial fields, such as chemical engineering, pharmacy engineering, energy engineering, and environment engineering [4]–[13].