Measurement of oil fraction in oil-water dispersed flow with swept-frequency ultrasound attenuation method
Introduction
When the oil field enters the middle and later stage of exploitation, the water content of crude oil increases significantly, usually between 70% and 80%, even to 90%. Accurate measurement for oil fraction of the oil-water dispersed flow is of great significance for predicting remaining productivity, ensuring the safety of oil production and transportation, and studying the flow characteristics of two-phase flow in the petroleum industry (Salim et al., 2008). However, due to the similar physical properties of oil-water two-phase and the unstable and random flow characteristics of the oil-water flow process, it is difficult to measure the oil fraction accurately (Angeli and Hewitt, 2000).
At present, the main measurement methods for phase fraction of the dispersed flow are quick closing valve method (Oddie et al., 2003), sedimentation method (Yoshida et al., 2001), radiation method (Kastengren et al., 2017), electrical method (Yan et al., 2017), optical-based diffraction and scattering measurement method (Dumouchel et al., 2009) and ultrasonic method (Su et al., 2017). The quick closing valve method and the sedimentation method are only used for off-line measurement conditions due to the measuring principle. The radiation method has high requirements for safety protection and measurement conditions, which makes it not suitable for use in industrial sites. Although the electrical method is simple in structure and fast in measurement, it needs to take the flow pattern or phase distribution as a priori information, which is very sensitive to the phase distribution state and flow pattern. Optical-based diffraction and scattering measurement methods can realize on-line measurement, but they are limited by light penetration. Ultrasonic method not only requires a lower measurement environment and conditions than optical method, but also has the advantage of non-invasive.
The ultrasonic attenuation obtained by ultrasonic transmission of the dispersion flow contains abundant fluid information, which can be used to measure the phase fraction. Yang carried out an experimental study on the particle concentration measurement of micron glass bead-glycerol suspension and aqueous polystyrene suspension with ultrasonic attenuation spectroscopy (Yang et al., 2016). Inoue studied the effect of temperature on ultrasonic attenuation and used attenuation spectroscopy to detect the particle size distribution of micron-sized gel particles dispersed in water (Inoue et al., 2018). Huang used Monte Carlo method to establish the characterization model of sub-micron particle size in the dispersion system, and predicted the ultrasonic attenuation of different particle size distribution by numerical calculation (Huang et al., 2019). Through the above research, it can be known that the particle size distribution is obtained by using multi-frequency attenuation information, so that the phase fraction of the dispersion system can be measured more accurately than the methods based on average particle size (Su et al., 2017, 2018). However, most studies are mainly focused on the dispersed flow with small particle size and large difference in physical parameters, while there is a lack of research on the dispersed flow with large particle size and similar physical parameters.
For different dispersion systems, the commonly used models of ultrasonic attenuation mechanism are the ECAH (Epstein-Carhart-Allegra-Hawley) model (Allegra and Hawley, 1971; Epstein and Carhart, 1953), BLBL (Bouguer-Lambert-Beer's Law) model (Riebel and Löffler, 1989), McClements model (McClements et al., 1998), HT (Harker & Temple) model (Harker and Temple, 1988) and so on. ECAH model is suitable to solve the dispersion flow with small particle size, where the wave length is far larger than the particle size, because it mainly considers the attenuation effect including the visco-inertial and thermal interaction of the dispersions. Waterman and Lloyd et al. improved the ECAH model by considering multiple scattering respectively (Lloyd and Berry, 1967; Waterman and Truell, 1961). The theory of ECAH model is complex, and it requires many physical parameters of the measured fluid, so it is difficult to be applied in practice. McClements and Povey et al. studied the simplified theoretical model of ultrasonic attenuation for dispersed systems with small density difference between dispersed and continuous phases considering the heat loss effect (McClements et al., 1998; Povey, 1997). Y. Hemar et al. considered the effect of the thermal wave overlap around the dispersed phase and established Core-Shell model (Hemar et al., 1997), but Core-Shell model is more complex than ECAH model, and it is also difficult to be applied in practice. A coupled phase model, including HT model and other related models (Dukhin and Goetz, 1996; Harker and Temple, 1988) was established to explain the ultrasonic attenuation based on hydrodynamics. Although the coupled phase model is a relatively mature theory, it is mainly suitable for dispersion systems with high density difference between two phases. Most of the above models are suitable for dispersed systems with small size of dispersed phase. For dispersed systems with large dispersed phase size, Rieble established a BLBL model (Riebel and Löffler, 1989) to explain the ultrasonic attenuation, which considered the acoustic energy loss caused by scattering. According to the characteristics of the oil-water dispersed flow with large droplet size and similar physical parameters, the BLBL scattering model combined with McClements absorption model is developed for prediction of ultrasonic attenuation in this paper.
The inversion problem of oil fraction based on ultrasonic attenuation model can be transformed into the solution of Fredholm integral equation of the first kind, which is an ill-posed problem. The commonly used inversion algorithms are regularization methods, such as L1-norm regularization (Xu et al., 2012), Tikhonov (Ayme-Bellegarda and Habashy, 1992), truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) (Zhang et al., 2019). The regularization algorithms are vulnerable to the impact of regularization parameter selection, which directly affect the accuracy of the inversion results; At the same time, the algorithms are linear inversion theories, which are not suitable for inversion calculation of oil fraction due to the nonlinear response of ultrasonic attenuation. In fact, the major goal of phase fraction inversion is to find an optimal value of a function of several variables, which can explain the observations of ultrasonic attenuation. Thus, the inversion problem can be transformed into a mathematical optimization problem. Therefore, trust region (TR) algorithm (Chen et al., 2018) combined with Gaussian quantum particle swarm optimization (GQPSO) (Tharwat and Hassanien, 2019) is proposed for inversion calculation of oil fraction in this paper. The function form of the problem to be optimized is close to the quadratic function in a small neighborhood. The TR method uses the quadratic model to approximate the original objective function, which can simply replace the linear search and solve the problem of the indefiniteness of Hessian matrix. However, the inversion result of the TR algorithm depends on the selection of the initial value. If the deviation between the initial value and the optimal value is too large, it is difficult to obtain the optimal value in the iterative process. Therefore, GQPSO is adopted to get the value which is close to the optimal value. Then, the result of GQPSO is used as the initial value of TR algorithm to get final inversion results.
According to the characteristics of the oil-water dispersed flow with large droplet size and similar physical parameters, the multi-frequency ultrasound attenuation method is proposed for the oil-water dispersed flow to measure the oil fraction in this paper. The BLBL model combined with McClements model is developed for prediction of ultrasonic attenuation based on the droplet size distribution; And the TR algorithm combined with GQPSO is proposed for inversion calculation of oil fraction based on the measured attenuation.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 establishes the attenuation prediction model for the ultrasonic propagation in the dispersed flow, and details the inversion algorithm for the oil fraction. Section 3 presents relevant simulations, numerical analysis and experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. Finally, Section 4 discusses conclusions and future extensions of this work.
Section snippets
Ultrasonic attenuation theory
The ultrasonic scattering effect is strong due to the large droplet size in the oil-water dispersed flow, so the BLBL model is used to predict the ultrasonic scattering attenuation; At the same time, the absorption attenuation cannot be ignored duo to similar physical parameters of the oil-water two-phase, so the McClements model is combined to predict absorption attenuation.
The BLBL model (Riebel and Kräte, 1994) is similar to the optical scattering theory. The ultrasound intensity balance in
Simulation analysis
As discussed in Section 2.1, the BLBL scattering model combined with McClements absorption model is developed to predict ultrasonic attenuation. This section verifies the prediction model of ultrasonic attenuation through simulation results. Because the droplet size distribution in the dispersed flow is difficult to calibrate, a simulation model of oil-water dispersed flow with multiple droplet sizes is established based on the acoustic module of COMSOL Multiphysics®.
Conclusion
In this paper, a swept-frequency ultrasound attenuation method based on droplet size distribution is proposed to measure the oil fraction in oil-water dispersed flow. First, the simulation of droplet size distributions at different oil fractions shows that the predicted attenuation values of the established ultrasonic attenuation model are basically consistent with the simulation results, which verifies the validity of BLBL model combined with McClements model. Then, the measurement method
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Han Yu: Methodology, Writing - original draft, Investigation. Chao Tan: Data curation, Writing - review & editing. Feng Dong: Supervision, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
No potential conflict of interest exists for this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their gratitude for the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61973229).
References (40)
- et al.
Flow structure in horizontal oil-water flow
Int. J. Multiph. Flow
(2000) - et al.
Light multiple scattering correction of laser-diffraction spray drop-size distribution measurements
Int. J. Multiph. Flow
(2009) - et al.
Numerical prediction of ultrasonic attenuation in concentrated emulsions and suspensions using Monte Carlo method
Ultrasonics
(2019) - et al.
Size distribution and elastic properties of thermo-responsive polymer gel microparticles in suspension probed by ultrasonic spectroscopy
Ultrasonics
(2018) - et al.
Measurements of droplet size in shear-driven atomization using ultra-small angle x-ray scattering
Int. J. Multiph. Flow
(2017) - et al.
Drop sizes and drop dispersion in straight horizontal tubes and in helical coils
Chem. Eng. Sci.
(1977) - et al.
Chirp excitation of ultrasonic guided waves
Ultrasonics
(2013) - et al.
Experimental study of two and three phase flows in large diameter inclined pipes
Int. J. Multiph. Flow
(2003) - et al.
Characterization of droplet sizes in large scale oil–water flow downstream from a globe valve
Int. J. Multiph. Flow
(2018) - et al.
Particle size characterization by ultrasonic attenuation spectra
Particuology
(2008)
Numerical simulation method of ultrasonic wave propagation in gas-liquid two-phase flow of deepwater riser
Mech. Syst.Signal Process.
Cross-correlation analysis of interfacial wave and droplet entrainment in horizontal liquid-liquid two-phase flows
Chem. Eng. J.
Particle sizing with improved genetic algorithm by ultrasound attenuation spectroscopy
Powder Technol.
Particle size measurement with an improved sedimentation balance method and microscopic method together with computer simulation of necessary sample size
Adv. Powder Technol.
Particle size distribution recovery in dynamic light scattering by optimized multi-parameter regularization based on the singular value distribution
Powder Technol.
Attenuation of sound in suspensions and emulsions: theory and experiment
Ultrasonics
Ultrasonic inverse scattering of multidimensional objects buried in multilayered elastic background structures.
IEEE Trans. Ultrasonics Ferroelectr. Freq. Control
Stochastic optimization using a trust-region method and random models
Math. Program.
Acoustic spectroscopy for concentrated polydisperse colloids with high density contrast
Langmuir
The absorption of sound in suspensions and emulsions. i. water fog in air
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
Cited by (14)
Computational fluid dynamics simulations of phase separation in dispersed oil-water pipe flows
2023, Chemical Engineering ScienceCitation Excerpt :They found that droplet size profiles in water-in-oil dispersions show a stratification over the cross-section, which is different from oil-in-water dispersions. Yu et al. (2020) developed a method of swept-frequency ultrasound attenuation to measure the oil fraction in pipes. Nguyen et al. (2017) conducted experimental and modeling studies of droplet deposition and coalescence in curved pipes, and employed an empirical correlation for droplet size distribution.
Acoustic stimulation of oil production by a downhole emitter based on a jet-driven Helmholtz oscillator
2022, Journal of Petroleum Science and EngineeringCitation Excerpt :decrease in oil viscosity (Hamidi et al., 2014; Huang et al., 2018; Junin et al., 2014; Razavifar and Qajar, 2020); changes in capillary forces and interfacial tension (Alhomadhi et al., 2014; Naderi and Babadagli, 2010; Yu et al., 2020); reduction of asphaltene-paraffin precipitations in productive layer and pipelines (Dehshibi et al., 2018; Luo et al., 2020; Salehzadeh et al., 2016; Taheri-Shakib et al., 2018);
Linear computed tomography of two-phase distribution in a rectangular channel
2022, Flow Measurement and InstrumentationCitation Excerpt :In order to discover two-phase distributions, advanced two-phase measurement tools have been designed and manufactured by previous scholars, such as wire mesh sensor (WMS) [1], electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) [2], electrical impedance tomography (EIT) [3], ultrafast X-ray tomography [4], multi-beam γ-ray densitometry [5], γ-ray tomography [6], neutron tomography [7,8]. Additionally, area-averaged or local phase fraction in a pipe can be measured by ultrasound attenuation system [9], single γ-ray transmission attenuation densitometry [10], optical fiber probe [11], electrical conductivity probe [12] and so on [13]. Void distribution in nuclear reactors is essential for reactivity control, plant efficiency and nuclear safety.
Flow rate measurement of oil-gas-water wavy flow through a combined electrical and ultrasonic sensor
2022, Chemical Engineering JournalCitation Excerpt :Accurate estimate on phase fraction and velocity is essential to flow rate measurement. Many techniques and measurement models have been developed for accurate estimation of phase fraction, such as methods based on radiation, microwaves, ultrasonic waves, and electrical approaches [7–11]. The last ones, which are mainly divided into conductance method, capacitance method and electromagnetic method according to different sensing principles, exploit distinct electrical properties of different phases for phase fraction measurement [9].
Ultrasound recognition method for flow patterns in oil-gas-water slug flow based on RBF neural network
2024, Huagong Jinzhan/Chemical Industry and Engineering ProgressUtilizing Advanced Mud Gas Data to Predict Oil Volume Fraction Using Machine Learning Algorithms
2024, International Petroleum Technology Conference, IPTC 2024