Abstract The wire-mesh sensor (WMS) is a kind of advanced instrument for gas-liquid two-phase flow measurements. In previous research, the sensitive volume was assumed to be uniformly distributed in the cross-section. The received current was assumed to represent the conductivity averaged over a uniform sensitive volume (USV), which is defined by symmetry considerations within the geometry of the electrode grids of the sensor. The void fraction within USV can be further determined based on the conductivity of USV. However, it is unphysical to determine the USV’s conductivity by the received current directly, since the true sensitive volume has an irregular shape due to the complexity of the potential field in the WMS. This study proposes an iterative method to determine the normalized conductivity averaged over each USV from the received current of WMS. The iterative method is based on potential field simulations within the electrode geometry of the WMS and an iterative process. To evaluate the performance of the iterative method, different normalized conductivity distributions were pre-defined. The maximum deviation between the pre-defined normalized conductivity and the normalized conductivity value determined by the new method was within 3%, instead of 30% for the conventional method. The performance of the new method for WMSs with different axial distance between transmitter and receiver grids La was also evaluated. For a larger La, more iterations need to be carried out to reach this accuracy. The limitation of this iterative method has been discussed. To reconstruct the sub-USV non-conductive phase distribution, the resolution of iterative method should be enhanced to describe the distribution of sub-USV non-conductive phase in future studies.

中文翻译：

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一种基于丝网传感器的迭代确定电导率分布的新方法

摘要 丝网传感器（WMS）是一种先进的气液两相流量测量仪器。在先前的研究中，假设敏感体积在横截面上均匀分布。假设接收到的电流代表均匀敏感体积 (USV) 上的平均电导率，这是由传感器电极网格几何结构内的对称性考虑定义的。USV 内的空隙率可以根据 USV 的电导率进一步确定。然而，直接通过接收到的电流确定 USV 的电导率是不实际的，因为 WMS 中势场的复杂性导致真实的敏感体积具有不规则的形状。本研究提出了一种迭代方法，可根据 WMS 接收到的电流确定每个 USV 上平均的归一化电导率。迭代方法基于 WMS 电极几何结构内的势场模拟和迭代过程。为了评估迭代方法的性能，预先定义了不同的归一化电导率分布。预先定义的归一化电导率与新方法确定的归一化电导率值之间的最大偏差在3%以内，而不是传统方法的30%。还评估了新方法在发射器和接收器网格 La 之间具有不同轴向距离的 WMS 的性能。对于更大的 La，需要进行更多的迭代才能达到这个精度。已经讨论了这种迭代方法的局限性。