Electromechanical flow imaging using ultrasound and electrical capacitance data

The imaging of multiphase flow is of vital interest in industries like oil and gas production in order to increase process efficiency. Tomographic methods allow non-invasive measurements, which is a clear advantage in the presence of aggressive fluids. Electrical capacitance and ultrasound sensors can be built at low cost and small size compared to established methods like X-ray tomography. However, they require the solution of a severely ill-posed inverse problem and consequently suffer from a rather low spatial resolution. In order to overcome the limitations of the single methods a combined imaging method utilizing both ultrasound and electrical capacitance measurements integrated on a single pipe section is presented. The acquired data sets contain complementary information that can be exploited through data fusion. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated with measurements of two-phase material distributions.