Particle-wall interaction behaviour is related to the optimization of chemical and petroleum production, and the real-time characterization of particles in liquid flow by accurate and convenient methods is still a challenge worldwide. In this work, the particle-wall behaviours collision and friction were distinguished from water flow behaviours based on a time-frequency method at four pipe positions. The specific refined frequency responses were calculated by zoom fast Fourier transform (Zoom-FFT) and multiscale frequency analysis methods, and eigenvectors were established based on the corresponding time-domain statistics. The test positions, flow velocities and particle sizes were auto-classified. A verification experiment was performed, and good agreement was found between the content (0.05-0.2 wt.%) of particles with a size range of 96-212 μm and the vibration response of ten discovered particle multiscale frequencies ranging from 43.2-50 kHz. In particular, high recognition rates were obtained for the different test positions (94.45 %), flow velocities (95.33 %), and particle sizes (91.00 %) by the support vector machine (SVM) method. The best three characteristic particle frequency bands were 45.6-46.4 kHz, 46.4-47.2 kHz and 47.2-48.0 kHz in the elbow. The relevant sand content detection error rates were 9.57 %, 4.81 %, and 6.78 %, which were improved greatly compared with those of our previous method. Therefore, this study complements the existing techniques and knowledge for particle characterization in multiphase flow.