Imaging wet gas separation process by capacitance tomography

Natural gas from a well contains water and hydrocarbons. It is necessary to separate the liquid components from such gas streams before use. An innovative type of separation facility, called Twister, has been developed for this purpose, and CFD models have been developed to assist in the design of Twister. However, it is difficult to verify the mathematical models directly and experimentally. To investigate the behavior of Twister and to verify the CFD models, a simulator using air and water vapor was set up in the laboratory. This simulator was instrumented with a highly sensitive electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) system based on an HP LCR meter and a purpose-designed multiplexer. Two ECT sensors, each with 8 measurement electrodes, were built taking into consideration the demanding operational conditions, such as sensitivity, temperature, pressure, geometry and location. This paper presents the first experimental results, showing that water droplets distributions in a flowing gas can be visualized using ECT, and the tomography system developed is robust and offers the possibility for further development to field operations.