Independent component analysis of the interface fluctuations of gas/liquid two-phase flow

It is important to study the interface fluctuations between the two phases in a gas/liquid flow to achieve an in-depth understanding of the mixture flow and subsequent optimization of industrial processes. This paper presents a study of the interface fluctuations between the gas and liquid phases in a pipeline. Experimental data are obtained from a gas/liquid two-phase flow rig through electrical resistance tomography (ERT). Independent component analysis (ICA) methods are applied not only to extract the flow regime information from the data but also the interface fluctuation of the flow. The efficiency of the ICA method with the ERT data has been assessed by experiments. The independent components have been interpreted by comparing them with the reconstructed images by ERT. The comparative studies have shown that ICA is effective in extracting the interface fluctuation of gas/liquid two-phase flow with weak coupling between two phases, especially for stratified flow and slug flow. Without the need of modelling the forward problem, this method can be applied to other electrical tomography modalities.