Voidage Measurement of Air-Water Two-Phase Flow Based on ERT Sensor and Data Mining Technology

Zhenzhen Meng, Zhiyao Huang, Baoliang Wang, Haifeng Ji, Haiqing Li

State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Department of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, zyhuang@iipc.zju.edu.cn

ABSTRACT

A new voidage measurement method is proposed for air-water two-phase flow based on ERT sensor and data mining technology. The data mining technology used in this work is LS-SVM algorithm together with the feature extraction method (principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares (PLS) are tested). In the practical voidage measurement process, the flow pattern is firstly identified directly from the conductance values obtained by the ERT sensor. Then, the appropriate voidage measurement model is selected according to the flow pattern identification result. Finally, the voidage is calculated. Experimental results show that the proposed method is an effective voidage measurement method and the measurement accuracy and speed are satisfactory. Compared with the conventional voidage measurement methods based on ERT, the proposed method doesn’t need any image reconstruction process and has the advantage of good real-time performance. Meanwhile, due to the introduction of flow pattern identification, the influence of flow pattern on the voidage measurement is overcome.

Keywords two-phase flow, voidage measurement, ERT sensor, data mining