Measurement of Gas-Oil Two-Phase Flow Patterns by Using CNN Algorithm Based on Dual ECT Sensors with Venturi Tube

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Feb 21;20(4):1200. doi: 10.3390/s20041200.

Abstract

In modern society, the oil industry has become the foundation of the world economy, and how to efficiently extract oil is a pressing problem. Among them, the accurate measurement of oil-gas two-phase parameters is one of the bottlenecks in oil extraction technology. It is found that through the experiment the flow patterns of the oil-gas two-phase flow will change after passing through the venturi tube with the same flow rates. Under the different oil-gas flow rate, the change will be diverse. Being motivated by the above experiments, we use the dual ECT sensors to collect the capacitance values before and after the venturi tube, respectively. Additionally, we use the linear projection algorithm (LBP) algorithm to reconstruct the image of flow patterns. This paper discusses the relationship between the change of flow patterns and the flow rates. Furthermore, a convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm is proposed to predict the oil flow rate, gas flow rate, and GVF (gas void fraction, especially referring to sectional gas fraction) of the two-phase flow. We use ElasticNet regression as the loss function to effectively avoid possible overfitting problems. In actual experiments, we compare the Typical-ECT-imaging-based-GVF algorithm and SVM (Support Vector Machine) algorithm with CNN algorithm based on three different ECT datasets. Three different sets of ECT data are used to predict the gas flow rate, oil flow rate, and GVF, and they are respectively using the venturi front-based ECT data only, while using the venturi behind-based ECT data and using both these data.

Keywords: convolutional neural network; electrical capacitance tomography; oil-gas two-phase flow.