A flow rate estimation method for gas–liquid two-phase flow based on filter-enhanced convolutional neural network

Accurate estimation of flow rate in gas–liquid two-phase flow is crucial for various industrial processes. How to accurately estimate flow rate remains a challenging problem. Previously, deep learning-based methods focused on a few human-set points with single task learning. In addition, the data were not denoised. In this study, a flow rate estimation method based on a filter-enhanced convolutional neural network (FECNN) is proposed for gas–liquid two-phase flow. The method leverages multimodal data from a Venturi tube and an electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) sensor as input, utilizing multilayer perceptron (MLP) to fuse data. Subsequently, a learnable filter module is employed to attenuate noise adaptively, followed by multiscale convolutional neural network (MSCNN) extraction of flow rate features at different scales. Finally, the method enables estimate each single-phase flow rate simultaneously through multi-task learning (MTL). The adaptive noise attenuation capabilities of the learnable filter module are demonstrated, and the ability of the proposed MSCNN to capture multiscale flow rate features through multiple comparative experiments is shown. Additionally, a qualitative comparison with recent flow rate estimation methods is provided. Overall, this study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed FECNN in flow rate estimation.