Velocity Profile Measurements of Two-Phase Flow in Rectangular Channel Using Ultrasonic Time-Domain Correlation Method

Velocity measurement using ultrasound has attracted much attention in engineering fields and medical science field. Especially, Ultrasonic velocity profile monitor (UVP) has been in the spotlight in engineering fields, because of its many diagnostic advantages. The major advantage is that UVP can obtain instantaneous velocity distributions on beam line by measuring Doppler shift frequencies of echo signals. And UVP is applicable to existing pipes, because it is non-contact measurement technique. In recent years, various studies about UVP have been done, and UVP has already been put to practical use in engineering plants. The authors especially focused on two-phase flow measurement using ultrasound. Previously, we developed a way to measure bubbly flow using UVP. By this method, we are able to separate liquid information from bubbles information to some degrees. However, when the bubble number density is low, a problem occurs. Because the effect of liquid information is strong under that condition. From this fact, we applied the ultrasound time domain correlation method (UTDC) to two-phase flow measurement. This method is our original technique to measure the velocity distribution. It is based on the cross-correlation between two consecutive echoes of ultrasonic pulses. With this method, we can separate liquid information from bubble information even when the bubble number density is low, because reflected signals depend on the size of reflectors and frequency of ultrasound. In this study, the authors applied the UTDC to two-phase flow measurements in rectangular channel using a multi-wave ultrasonic transducer (TDX). The multi-wave TDX has two kinds of basic frequencies. One is 2MHz for the velocity of rising bubbles and the other is 8MHz for the liquid velocity. So it enables us to measure the velocity of the liquid and that of bubbles at the same point and time. The 2MHz ultrasonic element of TDX has 10mm diameter and the 8MHz ultrasonic element has 3mm diameter.