Capacitive wire-mesh sensor measurements in oilwater flow

Abstract

Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.In this paper, a capacitive wire-mesh sensor was applied to investigate viscous-oil in water dispersed flow in a transparent acrylic section of 26-mm-i.d. and 12-m-length. The sensor was used to obtain in-situ volumetric phase fractions (holdup) and phase distributions in the pipe cross-section. Two mixture permittivity models from the literature, Maxwell– Garnett and Power–Law were applied to calculate the oil volumetric phase fractions in order to compare with the phase fraction measured via quick-closing valves technique (QCVs). In these models the relation is modified as function of a variable parameter. This paper presented a new attempt to find a suitable relation for holdup measurements in oil-water dispersed flows.