An electrical impedance monitoring method of water-lubricated oil transportation

We propose a simple and efficient monitoring system based on a single-drive interleaved electrode impedance technique that provides cross-sectional images for real-time detection of fouling in oil-water flows. The simple monitoring method is proposed using a data-interface formula relating between voltage differences measured at sensing electrodes and interfaces of the two immiscible fluids in a pipeline. We estimate the minimum distance between the interface and pipe wall at the images, that is an indicator for monitoring the fouling, by using a voltage-distance map. The robustness of the proposed method is validated through various numerical simulations including oil-water flows in an U-bend return pipe.