Experimental validation of the calculation of phase holdup for an oil-water two-phase vertical flow based on the measurement of pressure drops

摘要

The performance of metering the phase holdup of an oil-water two-phase vertical flow has been investigated based on the measurement of the gravity and frictional pressure drops. A U-tube, in which the same flow patterns can be obtained in downward and upward vertical flows, is designed to measure both gravity and fractional pressure drops. During the experiments, the mixture velocities of the oil and water are in the range of 0.28-4.65 m/s and the oil volume fraction from 0 to 1.0. The results show that the oil holdups calculated are satisfactory with the absolute error of ± 10%. The method presented in this work can be used to verify the results of tomography due to its simplicity and therefore is sufficient enough to be applied in industry.