The problem of how to accurately measure the flowrate of oil–gas–water mixtures in a pipeline remains one of the key challenges in the petroleum industry. This paper discusses why three-phase flow measurement is still important and why it remains a difficult problem to solve. The measurement strategies and principal base technologies currently used by commercial manufacturers are described, and research developments that could influence future flowmeter design are considered. Finally, future issues, which will need to be addressed by manufacturers and users of three-phase flowmeters, are discussed.

A dual sensor tomograph for three-component flow imaging has been built at the University of Bergen in cooperation with Christian Michelsen Research AS and Norsk Hydro AS. It utilizes an eight-electrode electrical capacitance tomograph and a γ-ray tomograph with five radiation sources and 85 compact detectors. Embedded transputers using memory-mapped I/O ensure high-speed data acquisition into an Alpha AXP-based on-line processing unit. The first results demonstrate that three-component flow regime identification is possible at rates of about 30 frames per second, provided that sufficient computing capability is available.

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A dual-mode tomography system based on electrical capacitance and gamma-ray tomography has been developed at the Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen. The objective of the dual-mode tomograph is to acquire cross-sectional images, i.e. tomograms, of hydrocarbon flow comprising oil, water and gas constituents. The capacitance tomograph utilizes an eight-electrode sensor set-up mounted around a PVC pipe structure which is sensitive to the electrical permittivity εr of the fluid. By using the capacitance tomograph, the produced water constituent can be separated from the gas and crude oil constituents, assuming that the liquid phase is oil continuous. The high-speed gamma-ray tomograph comprises five 500 mCi 241Am gamma-ray sources, each at a principal energy of 59.5 keV, which corresponds to five detector modules, each consisting of 17 CdZnTe detectors mounted around the same pipe section as the capacitance sensor. The gamma-ray tomograph discriminates between the gas and the liquid phase, since these have different photon attenuation properties. As a result, the gamma-ray tomograph is able to distinguish the gas phase from the liquid phase of the hydrocarbon flow. Consequently, the dual-mode capacitance and gamma-ray tomography set-up is able to distinguish the oil, water and gas constituents of hydrocarbon flow. This paper presents the work that has been performed related to static characterization of the dual-mode tomograph using the Landweber reconstruction algorithm on polypropylene phantoms. The objective of the work has been to quantitatively evaluate the static imaging performance of the dual-mode tomograph with respect to relative spatial measurement errors, i.e. root mean square errors of the reconstructed tomograms compared to that of the phantom. The work shows that dual-mode tomography using electrical capacitance and gamma-ray sensors is feasible on hydrocarbon flow components using a pixel-to-pixel fusion procedure on separately reconstructed tomograms based on the Landweber reconstruction algorithm.