A virtual platform of electrical tomography for multiphase flow imaging

Abstract

This paper reports a new approach to quantitatively evaluate the performance of Electrical Tomography (ET) in measuring dynamic multiphase flows. A virtual multiphase flow imaging platform based on ET is constructed and demonstrated on two typical gas–liquid flows, i.e., water–gas flow and oil–gas flow. Two coupling simulation cases, i.e., water–gas flow field and electric currents field coupling simulation and oil–gas flow field and electrostatics field coupling simulation, are performed to simulate multiphase flow sensing of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) and Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT). We quantitatively evaluated the representative EIT and ECT image reconstruction algorithms on the virtual evaluation platform bringing evidence of the improved capability to capture the key flow features of the fluid mixture with respect to traditional static phantoms. Ad-hoc treatment of the signal noise enables one to better capture dynamic responses of the fluid phase volume fractions and their spatial gradients throughout their mixing along the conduit, ultimately demonstrating unprecedented potential in the quantitative characterization of complex, unsteady multi-phase systems. The proposed image reconstruction constitutes a highly effective platform for quantitative performance evaluation of ET, parameter optimization of model-based ET image reconstruction algorithms, and for the development of data-driven ET algorithms in multiphase flow imaging.