A Novel Spiral Electromagnetic Induction Sensor for the Measurement of Phase Holdup

In two-phase (gas/liquid or liquid/liquid) flow measurements, phase holdup is an important parameter. Electromagnetic induction techniques have been applied for determining this parameter. However, due to inhomogeneous sensitivity of the conventional inductive sensors, the accuracy in measuring phase holdup is seriously affected by flow regimes. To overcome this problem, multiple sensor configurations such as MIT have been considered; however, the sensitivity maps of MIT are not homogenous and in addition, the complexity of a multiple channels measurement system increases significantly. In this paper, a novel spiral electromagnetic induction sensor was proposed. The sensitivity matrices of four different configurations of the sensor were calculated using MATLAB. Both simulations and experiments were carried out, which proved that the spiral style sensors have increased and more homogenous sensitivity distributions, making it more suitable for phase holdup measurement.