A new method for the on-line voidage measurement of gas-oil two-phase flow

Based on the capacitances obtained by 12-electrode ECT (electrical capacitance tomography) system and the least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) technique, a new method is proposed for the on-line voidage measurement of gas-oil two-phase flow. In practical voidage measurement process, the real-time flow pattern of the gas-oil two-phase flow is identified directly from 66 capacitances obtained by ECT system. Then, according to the flow pattern identification result, a suitable measurement model is selected and the voidage value is calculated. Research result shows the proposed method is effective. The voidage measurement result is flow pattern independent and the real-time performance is satisfactory. Meanwhile, compared with the conventional voidage measurement method based on ECT system, the proposed method can implement the voidage measurement without any image reconstruction process.