Measurement of Liquid Flow Rate among the Annular Flow in Vertical Tee Junction Using Digital Subtraction Method

Since the liquid flow rate of the annular flow is closely related to the heat exchange efficiency, it has great significance to measure the liquid flow rate of the annular flow in vertical tee junction. In order to acquire the liquid flow rate of the annular flow in vertical tee junction, a measurement method has been designed, which implements the digital subtraction method to measure the thickness of the liquid film under the visible light and to apply the image feature matching algorithm to obtain the liquid velocity field. Moreover, the accuracy of the liquid film velocity field as well as the spatial and temporal stability of the mass flow rate is tested by proposed algorithms in this study. Experimental results show that the measurement error of our method is approximately 5% in the lower section of the main pipe and the branch pipe, and lower than 15% in the upper section of the main pipe. Therefore, this method has a high accuracy in comparison with other measurement approaches. Our method can be applied to measure and analyse the shape and property of the annular flow in the vertical tee junction.