Tomographic multiphase flow measurement

Abstract

Measurement of multiphase flow of gas, oil and water is not at all trivial and in spite of considerable achievements over the past two decades, important challenges remain (Corneliussen et al., 2005). These are related to reducing measurement uncertainties arising from variations in the flow regime, improving long term stability and developing new means for calibration, adjustment and verification of the multiphase flow meters. This work focuses on the first two issues using multi gamma beam (MGB) measurements for identification of the type of flow regime. Further gamma ray tomographic measurements are used for reference of the gas/liquid distribution. For the MGB method one Am-241 source with principal emission at 59.5 keV is used because this relatively low energy enables efficient collimation and thereby shaping of the beams, as well as compact detectors. One detector is placed diametrically opposite the source whereas the second is positioned to the side so that this beam is close to the pipe wall. The principle is then straight forward to compare the measured intensities of these detectors and through that identify the flow pattern, i.e. the instantaneous cross-sectional gas-liquid distribution. The measurement setup also includes Compton scattering measurements, which can provide information about the changes in the water salinity for flow segments with high water liquid ratio and low gas fractions. By measuring the transmitted intensity in short time slots (<100 ms), rapid regime variations are revealed. From this we can select the time sections suitable for salinity measurements. Since the salinity variations change at the time scale of hours, a running average can be performed to increase the accuracy of the measurements. Recent results of this work will be presented here.