Study on performance of double helical capacitance probe for water fraction measurement in multiphase flow

A type of capacitance probe performance with two brass electrodes intertwined on the outer wall of insulation pipe like a double helix is investigated numerically in this paper, which can measure water fraction in air-oil-water two or three-phase flow in oil industry. The motivation of this paper is to optimize this kind of probe to improve its electric response and spatial resolution and so a 3-D numerical simulation using finite element method is employed to evaluate the effect of electrodes configuration of this capacitance probe on measuring water fraction in horizontal pipes. The electrostatic field of the probe is preliminarily analyzed referred to stratified flow of air-water two-phase flow regime. Several parameters are considered as main variables which have an important effect on the precision of the probe, such as central angle, position angle and length of the two electrodes. From the electrostatic field analysis, lumped capacitance between the two electrodes is obtained in every different electrode geometry model and the results of each model are compared to each other in order to select a better arrangement of the electrodes that has a better response to water fraction. And by using circuit simulation method, the numerical calculated lumped capacitance is transferred to voltage output through the circuit used in the experiment. The relationship between voltage and water fraction of calculated and experimental result are compared in order to test the reasonableness of the simulation. The results show that at high water fraction, the difference between numerical and measured data agrees very well.