Measurment of gas-liquid two-phase slug flow with a Venturi meter based on blind source separation☆

摘要

We propose a novel flow measurement method for gas–liquid two-phase slug flow by using the blind source sep-aration technique. The flow measurement model is established based on the fluctuation characteristics of differ-ential pressure (DP) signals measured from a Venturi meter. It is demonstrated that DP signals of two-phase flow are a linear mixture of DP signals of single phase fluids. The measurement model is a combination of throttle re-lationship and blind source separation model. In addition, we estimate the mixture matrix using the independent component analysis (ICA) technique. The mixture matrix could be described using the variances of two DP sig-nals acquired from two Venturi meters. The validity of the proposed model was tested in the gas–liquid two-phase flow loop facility. Experimental results showed that for most slug flow the relative error is within 10%. We also find that the mixture matrix is beneficial to investigate the flow mechanism of gas–liquid two-phase flow.