Measurement of oil volume fraction and velocity distributions in vertical oil-in-water flows using ERT and a local probe

This paper presents the use of a high performance dual-plane electric resistance tomography (ERT) system and a local dual-sensor conductance probe to measure the vertical upward oil-in-water pipe flows in which the mean oil volume fraction is up to 23.1%. A sensitivity coefficient back-projection (SBP) algorithm was adopted to reconstruct the flow distributions and a cross correlation method was applied to obtain the oil velocity distributions. The oil volume fraction and velocity distributions obtained from both measurement techniques were compared and good agreement was found, which indicates that the ERT technique can be used to measure the low fraction oil-water flows. Finally, the factors affecting measurement precision were discussed.