Image Reconstruction of Multiphase Flow Metering: A Compressed Sensing Approach

Multiphase flow measurements, based on tomographic imaging techniques, have made substantial progress in the past several years. In particular, ultrasonic tomographic reconstruction has shown its high potential in accurately measuring fluid fractions in a flow cross-section based on direct flow measurements. These types of measurements are very attractive as the system is nonradioactive, has direct contact to fluid, yet without flow obstruction. An ultrasonic tomographic multiphase flow meter (UTM) is being developed to capture the fluid flow rates and phase compositions in producing oil wells. The UTM aims to generate cross-sectional images of the flow inside the pipe. To recover these images, complex computations and high processing time are required, based on a limited amount of available data. For this purpose, compressive sensing (CS) reconstruction methods have shown great potential in overcoming the mentioned data quality and quantity issues. CS builds upon the fact that one can recover certain data of interest from potentially very few measurements. Many CS algorithms have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we seek to find a suitable algorithm by comparing different CS algorithms in terms of the resulting recovered image quality. Specifically, we survey three algorithms in CS, namely basis pursuit, iterative soft thresholding (IST), and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP). We also compare the results of the CS algorithms to that of a least-square based conventional algorithm. The numerical results show the superiority of CS recovery algorithms over the conventional approach, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results also suggest that high image quality could potentially be achieved with less complex CS algorithms, i.e., the IST and OMP algorithms. As presented in the paper, our goal is to adapt CS reconstruction algorithms for images generated by the UTM, for the purpose of accurate quantification of oil, gas, and water phase fractions produced from different wells.