Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) has the capability of offering time-evolving multidimensional comprehensive process knowledge, enrichment of fundamental process understanding and enhancement of the design and operation of process equipment by measuring the conductivity distribution within a process-plant of interest. This paper reviews the wide variety of previous work on ERT applications to Chemical Engineering. The applications are categorized based on the unit operations ERT has been applied to, the media under investigation, the purpose of ERT measurements and also other technologies used in conjunction with ERT. The aim of this taxonomy is to provide the reader with a general understanding of the current situation of ERT related research and proven applications in the Chemical Engineering field and to facilitate the recognition of research gaps for future investigation. Based on this detailed taxonomy and review the potential application of ERT to the milk powder processing industry was identified. Some results of the application of ERT to milk mixing/holding tanks and milk flow pipelines for the purpose of concentration and composition measurements, detection of abnormalities and faults, and multidimensional flow and velocity profile measurements have also been presented as a case study of using this taxonomy.

Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) applications to Chemical Engineering

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1865&context=etd

Discharge Coefficient Performance of Venturi, Standard Concentric Orifice Plate, V-cone and Wedge Flow Meters at Low Reynolds Numbers

A combination method for metering gas–liquid two-phase flows of low liquid loading applying ultrasonic and Coriolis flowmeters

How accurate are Capacitance Model connectivity estimates

Online measurement of gas and liquid flow rate in wet gas through one V-Cone throttle device

High GVF and low pressure gas–liquid two-phase flow measurement based on dual-cone flowmeter

Slug flow is an important flow regime of gas/liquid two-phase flow. The parameters measurements of slug flow are of great importance in scientific and engineering field. Local cross-correlation method is put forward in this paper to make the mixed velocity measurement of slug flow. Different from normal cross-correlation method, this local cross-correlation make direct use of electrode voltage data and gives detail velocity information of the cross-section. According to the electrode distribution in the pipe cross-section, the excitation manners have been sorted into 3 kinds and measured electrodes have been cut into 9 sorts. A static experiment is carried out to testify and concretely analyze the sensitivity difference of different excitation manners and different located measuring electrodes. Results of static experiment verify the above sorting manner and show that different excitation manner and different measured area has its own apparent data feature and. In this local cross correlation method, only selected electrode pairs instead of all electrodes as normal data process participate in excitation process. So the system efficiency has improved, and as a consequence the velocity resolution of cross correlation is improved. The dynamic experiment result shows the efficiency of this local cross-correlation method and the experiment error is within 10%.

A measurement method of slug flow velocity of gas-liquid two-phase flow in horizontal pipe

In petroleum industry, oil-water two-phase flow widely exists in production wells, and the measurement of oil-water flow is significant in oil well logging. One method in common use is to build a theoretic model to connect differential pressures generated by a throttling set with flow-rate. Several measuring models were adopted and compared for model selection and modification. A V-cone with 0.65 diameter ratio was selected as the throttling set because of its special structure and intrinsic advantages. In the experiments, the differential pressures measured under different flow range were processed with a homogeneous flow model. And the results show that the error is small in the condition where the oil and water are well mixed, while the error is big when they are not well mixed. A polynomial of the error and the water percentage was fitted to improve the model accuracy and widen the measurement range.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/147/1/012059/pdf

Flow rate measurement of oil-water two-phase flow based on V-cone flow meter

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.

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

A multi-sensor fusion system is applied to the measurement of slug flow in gas/liquid two-phase flow. V-cone meter, correlation technology, cross-section system, and time fusion are adopted in this fusion method. Cross-section sytem is good at the flow regime recognition and cross-section void fraction calculation, while the V-cone meter with its differential pressure model does well in the flow rate measurement, they are complementary to each other. After time fusion, the measured data is cut into alternate combination of gas plug and liquid plug, different model are applied to them for V-cone meter to calculate the mass flow rate. The primary experimental result shows this method based on multi-sensor fusion is acceptable.

Fusheng Zhang

Papers

High GVF and low pressure gas–liquid two-phase flow measurement based on dual-cone flowmeter

A measurement method of slug flow velocity of gas-liquid two-phase flow in horizontal pipe

Flow rate measurement of oil-water two-phase flow based on V-cone flow meter

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

Cross-section system and V-cone meter fusion in plug flow measurement