Flowrate Estimation of Horizontal Gas–Water Slug Flow Based on Venturi Tube and Conductance Sensor

In this article, we present a novel flowrate measurement method for horizontal gas–water slug flow from the differential pressure of a Venturi tube and the average liquid film thickness from a conductance sensor, which can be developed into a promising cost-effective flowrate measurement solution. First, a Venturi differential pressure model for slug flow is proposed based on de Leeuw’s overreading (OR) model and then combined with the average liquid film thickness model of the interfacial wave, and the flowrates of gas and water can be estimated. A series of experiments are carried out on our laboratory experimental loop with the pipeline diameter of 50 mm. The experimental results show that the proposed method can give relatively accurate estimations for the flowrates of gas and water with the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) in 2.63% and 2.89%, respectively. Finally, we give the interpretation of the experimental results based on the sensitivity analysis and the error propagation analysis.