An experimental study of on-line measurement of water fraction in gas-oil-water three-phase flow

Gas-oil-water two-or three-phase flow is widely encountered in industry, such as petroleum chemical industry, bio-chemicals, food chemicals, and mineral engineering and energy projects. Two kinds of on-line measurement technique, which are double-ring conductance sensor and double-helical capacitance sensor, for water fraction in oil-water two-phase flow and gas-oil-water three-phase flow were developed in this paper. The calibration results shows that the responses of the two sensors are good enough as the variation of water fraction. And on the other hand, it is possible that the oil and the gas regard as one phase in gas-oil-water three-phase flow by using double-helical capacitance sensor, and the ratio between water and gas has no effect with the output signal. The range of water fraction which can be measured becomes bigger and bigger because of the using of new circuit. So the capacitance sensor is better enough to measure water fraction in the three phases flow. During dynamic experiment, because of phase inversion phenomenon between oil and water, the conductance sensor outputs poorly, however the capacitance sensor performs somewhat fine. The reason for the error using capacitance sensor is the edge effect of the capacitance. The experiment results show that the edge effect of the double-helical capacitance sensor causes that the output is smaller so that the measuring water fraction is a litter larger than the actual value. And when the variation of water fraction is above 10%, the edge effect of capacitance sensor can be almost neglected. On the contrary, when the variation of water fraction is below 10%, the edge effect is so lager than the results above that it cannot be ignored. Consequently, the double-helical capacitance probe is more suitable for measuring water fraction in slug flow and oil-water emulsion, in which the results agree better with static calibration than that in bubble flow.