Wet Gas Flow Regime Identification Based on WPT and PNN

A novel noninvasive approach to the online flow regime identification for wet gas flow in a horizontal pipeline is proposed. Research into the flow-induced vibration response for the wet gas flow was conducted, with the conditions of pipe diameter 50 mm, pressure from 0.25 MPa to 0.35 MPa, Lockhart-Martinelli parameter from 0.02 to 0.6, and gas Froude Number from 0.5 to 2.7. The flow-induced vibration signals were measured by a vibration transducer installed by outside wall of pipe, and then the normalized energy features from different frequency bands in the vibration signals were extracted through 4-scale wavelet package transform (WPT) with mother wavelet db7. A probabilistic neural network (PNN) classifier with the extracted features as inputs was developed to identify the three typical flow regimes including stratified wavy flow, annular mist flow, and slug flow for wet gas flow. The results show that the method can identify effectively flow regimes and its identification accuracy arrives at above 92.1%. The noninvasive measurement approach has great application prospect in online flow regime identification.