Electrical capacitance tomography and LS-SVM based voidage measurement

A new method was proposed for on-line voidage measurement of oil-gas two-phase flow based on 12-electrode electrical capacitance tomography(ECT) and least squares support vector machine(LS-SVM).This method identified flow pattern by using fast back-projection image reconstruction and fuzzy pattern recognition technique.LS-SVM was used to establish the voidage measurement models under different flow patterns.In each model,66 capacitance values from ECT sensor were the inputs and the corresponding voidage value was the output.In the measurement process,the flow pattern of oil-gas two-phase flow was identified firstly,and then the voidage was computed using the voidage measurement model corresponding to the identified flow pattern.This new method implements voidage measurement without complicated and time-consuming image reconstruction and thus improves the real-time performance of voidage measurement.Experimental results showed the effectiveness of the new method.