Ultrasound Flow-Monitoring and Flow-Metering of Air-Oil-Water Three-Layer Pipe Flows

The combined use of ultrasound pulse-echo intensity and Doppler shift frequency is examined as a means to measure strong unsteady three-phase pipe flows of a gas and two liquids. With air, oil, and water as components of the fluid media, particular attention is given to analyze ultrasound responses at the air-oil and oil-water interfaces. Reciprocating slugging is generated inside a 55-mm-diameter circular pipe, of which edges oscillate vertically at a controlled frequency. We use an ultrasound velocity profiler to obtain the 1-D cross-sectional distributions of the instantaneous flow velocity at the sampling rate of 60 Hz. All the measurements are realized by a single ultrasound transducer located outside the pipe. Measurement accuracy is validated using a high-speed camera coupled with particle image velocimetry that is synchronized with the profiler. The results demonstrate that the proposed technique works properly in sensing both interfaces as well as in-phase flow velocity distributions. In addition, multiphase volume flow rates for the constituents are obtained by velocity profile integration assuming vertical phase stratification in an approximation.