A Wet Gas Metering System Based on the Extended-Throat Venturi Tube

Abstract

Although the use of a classical Venturi tube for wet gas metering has been extensively studied in the literature, the use of an extended-throat Venturi (ETV) tube has rarely been reported since its first proposal by J. R. Fincke in 1999. The structure of an ETV is very simple, but due to the complexity of multiphase flow, its theoretical model has not been fully established yet. Therefore, in this paper theoretical models have been developed for the convergent and throat sections of an ETV, and the gradients of front and rear differential pressures are derived analytically. Several flowrate algorithms have been proposed and compared with the existing ones. Among them, the iteration algorithm is found to be the best. A reasonable explanation is provided for its performance. The relationship between the differential pressure gradient and the flowrate relative error is also studied, such that the relative error distributions varying with ETV measured flowrates can be derived. The gas flowrate error of ETV increases with the liquid content whilst the liquid flowrate error of ETV decreases with the liquid content, and the relative errors of liquid flowrate are generally 2 to 3 times larger than that of the gas flowrate. Finally, the ETV tends to be more accurate than the classical Venturi tube. The ETV can be designed more compact under the same signal intensity due to its significantly higher velocity in the throat section.