Application: Flow
Flow Measurement/Flow Visualization
Flow processes may involve a variety of phases or components in the gas, liquid or solid phase and are complex in their nature. Electrical tomography techniques provide the capability for flow visualisation, regardless of material opacity, to enhance the understanding of such complex flow processes.
Applications:
- Laboratory based flow loops
- Field applications using spool based sensors
- Pilot/Production
- Research/Process Monitoring
- Process Development
ITS instrumentation can be used to visualise a range of multiphase systems including:
- Liquid-liquid
- Solid-liquid
- Gas-liquid
And 3 component systems such as oil water and gas under a range of flow regimes including:
- Slug flow
- Bubbly flow
- Churn flow
- Annular flow
- Stratified flow
- Turbulent flow
It should be noted that electrical tomography systems have not been tested on every flow regime, but are one of the few technologies which can measure flow of opaque fluids in real time.
Powder flows:
Electrical resistance tomography is used when the continuous medium is conducting and capacitance tomography is used when the it is non conducting such as powder flow. By offering these two measurement platforms ITS instrumentation can offer flow visualisation across nearly all multiphase systems.
Process tomography can provide information on:
- Volume fractions
- Relative concentrations
- Monitor phase inversion
Benefits include:
- Increased confidence when designing flow systems with capital cost savings
- Determine flow conditions
- Investigate flow rates of multi-component flow
Right Click to zoom
This shows the conductivity image from a single measurement plane for hydraulic conveying. The usual colour scale blue-green-red with low conductivity as blue and high conductivity as red. The non-conducting solids are towards the bottom of the pipe as indicating the blue colouring. Water dominates at the top of the pipe as indicated by the red colouring.
Process Tomography can be used to:
Measure Multi-phase flow
The three phase detection of air / water / oil with ITS m3000 multi-modal system
The above shows:
Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) data (water at pixel height 1-4 out of 20) = 2cm (2.5cm actual)
Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) data (oil-water phase at pixel height 1-19 out 32) = 6cm (6.5cm actual)
Characterise flow regimes
Bubbly Flow
Turbulent flow
Measure concentration of different components in multiphase flow:
The images below show solids concentration profiles of a slurry (courtesy of Leeds and Nottingham Universities).
Reconstructed volume fraction distributions at the downstream position L/D=3.0 with different concentration set-ups of and a fixed flow rate of 1.0m/s. The images were reconstructed using Sensitivity Conjugate Gradients algorithm.
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