Experimental study of oil-water two-phase flow patterns in a vertical large diameter pipe

The flow structure and the phase inversion have great influence on the flow measurement in vertical upward oil-water two-phase flow. This paper attempts to investigate the flow patterns in oil-water flows through a vertical upward large pipe with the designed mini-conductance array probes measurement system and the vertical multi-electrode array (VMEA) measurement system. According to the output waveform of the mini-conductance array probes, the oil-in-water flow, transition flow and water-in-oil flow can be identified effectively. The fluctuating signals of the VMEA is processed by the recurrence plot and the time-frequency representation, the results show that the VMEA conductance signal with average measurement characteristics can realize an effective identification of the above three flow patterns, which has a good agreement with the results of the mini-conductance array probes. Finally, via comparing with previous published flow pattern transition boundary models in different pipe diameters, it is founded that the boundary line of the transition to oil-in-water based on the kinematic wave-based model and the observation-based model in the same diameter pipe are consistent with our experimental data. And the pipe diameter affects the flow pattern transition, compared with the boundary in small diameter pipe, the phase inversion requires a larger oil velocity, and the transition zone becomes narrower in large diameter pipe.