CNN-Based Volume Flow Rate Prediction of Oil–Gas–Water Three-Phase Intermittent Flow from Multiple Sensors

In this paper, we propose a deep-learning-based method using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict the volume flow rates of individual phases in the oil–gas–water three-phase intermittent flow simultaneously by analyzing the measurement data from multiple sensors, including a temperature sensor, a pressure sensor, a Venturi tube and a microwave sensor. To build datasets, a series of experiments for the oil–gas–water three-phase intermittent flow in a horizontal pipe, in which gas volume fraction and water-in-liquid ratio ranges are 23.77–94.45% and 14.95–86.97%, respectively, and gas flow superficial velocity and liquid flow superficial velocity ranges are 0.66–5.23 and 0.27–2.14 m/s, respectively, have been carried out on a test loop pipeline. The preliminary results indicate that the model can provide relative prediction errors on the testing-1 dataset for the volume flow rates of oil-phase, gas-phase and water-phase within ±10% with 94.49%, 92.56% and 95.71% confidence levels, respectively. Additionally, the prediction results on the testing-2 dataset also demonstrate the generalization ability of the model. The consuming time of a prediction with one sample is 0.43 s on an Intel Xeon CPU E5-2678 v3, and 0.01 s on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU. Hence, the proposed CNN-based prediction model, which can fulfill the real-time application requirements in the petroleum industry, reveals the potential of using deep learning to obtain accurate results in the multiphase flow measurement field.