A novel method to identify the flow pattern of oil–water two-phase flow

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a novel method combining extreme learning machine (ELM) and multiple empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) to identify flow patterns of oil–water two-phase flow. The proposed method can recognize accurately five typical flow patterns of horizontal oil–water two-phase flow. Taking the Lorenz system as an example, we verify the MEMD is more suitable for simultaneous decomposition of multi-channel signals than empirical mode decomposition and ensemble empirical mode decomposition. In the proposed method, we employ the MEMD to decompose the multivariate conductance signal of oil–water two-phase flow to obtain the same intrinsic mode function modes, select the normalized energy of the high-frequency components as the eigenvalue, and utilize the trained ELM to achieve a good recognition result. The experimental results show that the proposed method is not only fast and generalized, but also has high accuracy in identifying flow patterns of oil–water two-phase flow.

Keywords

• Oil–water two-phase flow
• ELM
• MEMD
• IMF
• Normalized energy