Identification of two-phase flow regime using ultrasonic phased array

Flow regime is one of the key characteristics of gas-liquid two-phase pipe-flows and its identification is essential for several industrial applications. In this paper, the ultrasonic phased array technology is used to identify flow regimes of two-phase (air-water) vertical flow. The ultrasonic phased array can perform multi-point, omnidirectional detection to obtain high-resolution data suitable for image processing. The scanned images, which have distinctive features, are subjected to a series of image-treatment techniques, such as principle component analysis, to extract information necessary for flow regime identification. The K-nearest neighbors (KNN) classification algorithm is then used to identify flow regimes with high accuracy.