Oil-water two-phase flow measurement with a V-cone meter in a horizontal pipe

In petroleum industry, oil-water two-phase flows widely exist in production wells, and their measurements are of significance in oil well logging, transportations and etc. One of the techniques in common use in oil-water two-phase flow measurement is the differential pressure (DP) meters with a theoretic model connecting the mass flowrate of the mixture with the differential pressures generated by the throttling element installed inside the pipeline. In this work, a series of oil-water two-phase flow experiments were conducted in a horizontal pipe of 50 mm diameter and the flowrates were measured by a V-cone meter with a diameter ratio of 0.65. Available correlations of DP meters that developed from gas-water two-phase flows are adopted on the analysis of the measured data from the V-cone meter. A modified correlation is proposed based on the analysis and comparison between the available correlations. The experiments results have shown that the proposed method achieves better accuracy in oil-water two-phase flow measurement than other DP correlations.