Concentration measurement of two-phase flow by means of FastICA and LS-SVM

Based on 66 capacitance values by 12-electrode capacitance sensor, combining Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA) with Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) algorithms, a new method for phase concentration measurement of two-phase flow was proposed. FastICA was used to extract the independent components from capacitance values. LS-SVM was used to establish the model for phase concentration measurement of two-phase. In this model, independent components were the inputs and the concentration was the output. In the measurement process, the capacitance values were obtained by ECT sensor; the independent components were extracted by FastICA algorithm; then the independent components were fed to the model and the concentration value was calculated. This new method implemented direct concentration measurement of two-phase flow without the need of time-consuming image reconstruction. The experimental results show that it is effective and the measurement error is within 5.3%.