Measurement of high-water-content oil-water two-phase flow by electromagnetic flowmeter and differential pressure based on phase-isolation

When the oil field has been exploited by long-term water-flooding, it will be in high water-content stage of production. However, it is a great challenge for high-water-content measurement due to oil droplets extremely dispersed in the water. In this paper, we developed a phase-isolation based method for high-water-content oil-water two-phase flow measurement. Phase-isolation was realized by axial-flow swirler to concentrate scattered and random oil droplets into the pipe center and change the inlet flow pattern into a particular annular flow before measuring. Owing to the axisymmetric velocity and phase distribution, the electromagnetic flow meter avoided the effect of random distribution of insulating phase, and then had a good measurement performance for total volume flow rate. Furthermore, we respectively studied using axial pressure drop, radial pressure drop and the ratio of the two pressure drops to measure water content. The results showed that the ratio of the two pressure drops not only improves the resolution of oil and water, but also effectively reduces the impact of error transfer. In the dual-parameter measurement experiment, the relative errors of total volume flow rate and water content were almost within ±5%.