A new wireless sensor-based tomographic device to determine the liquid saturation in a mulitphase flow

摘要

This paper presents a novel concept of measurement in the area of single and multi phaseflow instrumentation to build in real-time the two dimensional cross section of a fluidpassing through the pipe. The principle of operation consists of fitting a multitude ofintercommunicating miniature wireless sensor network devices within the cross sectionof the probe. Each of these sensing elements integrates an electrode to measure theelectrical conductivity of the process flow using the Electrical Impedance Tomography(EIT) technique. Other sensors such as the pressure, capacitance, and ultrasonic sensorsmight be added in the future to provide more complementary information on theelectrical and acoustic properties of the process fluid. The digitalized data is thentransferred to an external remote transmitter which performs in real-time the twodimensional reconstruction of the image of the flow passing through the sensors array.This transmission of data is done in a time multiplexing manner, avoiding data collision,where each sensing node is allocated a predefined time slot. The cross sectionaltomography images of static images which are reconstructed offline using this conceptare presented.