An Experimental and Simulation Study for Comparison of the Sensitivity of Different Non-Destructive Capacitive Sensors in a Stratified Two-Phase Flow Regime

Abstract

Measuring the volume fraction of each phase in multi-phase flows is an essential problem in petrochemical industries. One of the standard flow regimes is stratified two-phase flow, which occurs when two immiscible fluids are present in a pipeline. In this paper, we performed several experiments on vertical concave, horizontal concave, and double-ring sensors to benchmark obtained simulation results from modeling these sensors in stratified two-phase flow using COMSOL Multiphysics software. The simulation data was confirmed by experimental data. Due to the low number of data in the experimental method in order to extract more data, the mentioned software was used to extract more data and then compare the sensitivity of different directions of concave and double ring sensors. The simulation results show that the overall sensitivity of the concave is higher than the double-ring and the momentary sensitivity of the horizontal concave is higher in higher void fractions, and the vertical one has higher sensitivity in lower void fractions.

Keywords

• sensitivity
• capacitive sensor
• stratified regime
• double ring
• vertical concave
• horizontal concave