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Tomographic pulse wave ultrasonic Doppler method for cross-sectional velocity distribution imaging of dispersed oil-water two-phase flow

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Abstract

Dispersed Oil-water two-phase flow widely exists in many industrial processes, where the accurate measurement of 2-D cross-sectional velocity distribution of dispersed phase is beneficial for understanding flow mechanism and monitoring industrial process. However, the current single-line pulsed wave ultrasonic Doppler (PWUD) method delivers relatively large error due to the multi-scattering and Doppler effect accumulation. To address this problem, we propose a novel tomographic PWUD sensing strategy along with a multi-receiver correction of velocity profile. With sequential excitation and multi-receiver sensing strategy, the Doppler velocity on emission line is a weighted summation from the three adjacent transducers, which alleviates frequency shift error from multi-scattering and Doppler effect accumulation. On this basis, accurate velocity profiles on eight emission lines are obtained and the cross-sectional velocity profiles are reconstructed. The performance of the proposed method has been validated through numerical simulation and experimental tests with the proposed Doppler signal computation model and a multi-channel measurment system. The relative error of the measured 1-D velocity profile and the reconstructed 2-D cross-section velocity distribution are reduced by 76.43\(\mathbf \%\) and 80.75\(\mathbf \%\) compared with the multi-line PWUD method.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61973229) and the Laboratory of Science and Technology on Marine Navigation and Control (No. 2020010203).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tianjin Key Laboratory of Process Measurement and Control, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Hao Liu, Chao Tan, Weiling Liu & Feng Dong

  2. Laboratory of Science and Technology on Marine Navigation and Control, China State Shipbuilding Corporation, Tianjin, 300131, China

    Chao Tan

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  1. Hao Liu
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  2. Chao Tan
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  3. Weiling Liu
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  4. Feng Dong
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Correspondence to Chao Tan.

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Liu, H., Tan, C., Liu, W. et al. Tomographic pulse wave ultrasonic Doppler method for cross-sectional velocity distribution imaging of dispersed oil-water two-phase flow. Exp Fluids 63, 73 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00348-022-03408-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00348-022-03408-7

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