2396 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 63, NO.
10, OCTOBER 2014
Gas–Liquid Two-Phase Flow Correction
Method for Digital CMF
Qi-Li Hou, Ke-Jun Xu, Min Fang, Yan Shi, Bo-Bo Tao, and Rong-Wei Jiang
Abstract— There are large measurement errors in Coriolis
mass flowmeter (CMF) when it is used to measure gas–liquid
two-phase flow without compensation. In particular, the flowtube
of CMF may stall when using analog transmitters and CMF
cannot operate normally because of the high damping caused by
gas–liquid two-phase. To solve above problems, a gas–liquid two-
phase flow rig is developed to perform the two-phase flow experi-
ments. A digital drive method using multiplying digital-to-analog
converter and direct digital synthesizer is applied to CMF to
maintain the flowtube oscillation under two-phase flow condition.
A digital zero-crossing detection method based on Lagrange
interpolation is adopted to calculate the frequency and phase
difference of the sensor output signals in order to synthesize the
digital drive signal and realize the flow measurement. The artifi-
cial neural network using back propagation algorithm is applied
to correct measurement errors. A digital Coriolis mass flow
transmitter is developed with a digital signal processor to control
the digital drive, and realize the two-phase flow measurement
and correction. By connecting the developed transmitter with
a CMF025 type primary instrument, the gas–liquid two-phase
flow experiments are conducted to validate the performance of
the transmitter. The testing results show that the transmitter can
maintain the flowtube oscillation and reduce the metering errors.
Index Terms— Artificial neural network, Coriolis mass
flowmeter (CMF), digital drive method, digital zero-crossing
detection method, gas–liquid two-phase flow.
I. I NTRODUCTION
C ORIOLIS mass flowmeter (CMF) has been widely used
in industry applications because it can measure mass flow
directly and obtain the density simultaneously [1]. Researchers
have studied many digital signal processing methods and
developed digital transmitters, which have been applied to the
measurement of single-phase flow successfully in [2]–[6].
However, in industrial applications, gas–liquid two-phase
flow condition occurs inevitably. For example, during oil
transportation, the gas–liquid condition happens as the fluid
contains natural gas. During food processing, high-pressure
Manuscript received October 8, 2013; revised January 17, 2014; accepted
January 24, 2014. Date of publication March 28, 2014; date of current
version September 11, 2014. This work was supported in part by the
National High Technology Research and Development Program under Con-
tract 2009AA04Z128 and in part by the China Aviation Industry Cooperative
Innovation Program under Contract CXY2011HFGD23. The Associate Editor
coordinating the review process was Dr. Niclas Bjorsell. (Corresponding
author: K.-J. Xu.)
Q.-L. Hou, M. Fang, Y. Shi, B.-B. Tao, and R.-W. Jiang are with the School
of Electrical and Automation Engineering, Hefei University of Technology,
Hefei 230009, China.
K.-J. Xu is with the School of Electrical and Automation Engineering, Hefei
University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China, and also with the Engineering
Technology Research Center of Industrial Automation, Hefei 230009, China
(e-mail: dsplab@hfut.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2014.2310031
0018-9456 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
compressed air may be used to purge the line between batches.
This may exacerbate gas–liquid condition at the beginning and
end of the batch and air entrainment is the most commonly
occurring case of gas–liquid flow. When gas–liquid two-phase
flow condition occurs, the density difference of the gas and
liquid causes the relative movement between the gas particle
and liquid. The friction between the gas particle and the
fluid consumes energy so the power of the tube driver rises
to compensate the energy loss. In addition, because of the
existence of relative movement, not all the particles in the
tube are laterally moved with the tube amplitude and the mass
flow reading is less [7]. Experimental data shows that even
small amount of entrained air can cause significant errors [1].
What’s worse, relatively large amount of entrained air can
induce very high and rapidly fluctuating damping. If the driver
cannot provide enough power in time, then the tube stalls and
no measurement can be provided. Therefore, the measurement
of gas–liquid two-phase flow is still difficult for CMF.
To maintain the flowtube oscillation under two-phase flow
condition, many digital drive methods have been studied
and applied to CMF. Maginnis [8] introduced an initial-
ization algorithm for drive control of CMF. Shimada [9]
combined the analog drive method with the digital wave
synthesis drive method based on phase-locked loop. Henry
and Zamora [10] studied many drive methods of CMF, like
random sequence mode, positive feedback mode, and digital
synthesis mode. The digital synthesis mode was realized by
field programmable gate array (FPGA) in [11]. Hou et al.
[12] studied the drive method using multiplying digital-to-
analog converter (MDAC) and direct digital synthesizer (DDS)
chip and developed a digital transmitter to realize the drive
control and flow measurement. These digital drive meth-
ods provide the premise for the measurement of two-phase
flow.
To reduce the metering errors of two-phase flow, additional
correcting methods are needed. Hemp and Yeung [13] pro-
posed a bubble model to correct the measurement errors. This
model predicts monotonic, negative errors which are a function
only of the gas void fraction (GVF). But Liu et al. [14] found
that the actual response observed from a commercial CMF was
very different from this model. The experimental results of [7]
and [14]–[16] show that the measurement errors of two-phase
flow are affected not only by GVF, but also by fluid velocity,
flowtube orientation, and geometry. Their experimental results
of metering errors turn out to be complicated nonlinearity
and nonmonotonic. Therefore, Henry et al. [14]–[16] used
multilayer perceptron and the radial basis function (RBF)
network to correct the metering errors.
HOU et al.: GAS–LIQUID TWO-PHASE FLOW CORRECTION METHOD FOR DIGITAL CMF
Fig. 1. Schematic of two-phase flow experimental rig.
Gysling [17] proposed an aeroelastic model to address the
effects of compressibility and inhomogeneity introduced by
aerated fluids. However, this model is under the assumption
that bubbles are well mixed within the liquid continuous
phase. As a result, this model cannot address slugging and/or
stratified flows within Coriolis phenomena that can often occur
in start-up and batching processes, but rather it is intended to
address a class of application in which the amounts of gas is
relatively small (GVF is smaller than 10%). In addition, there
is no correcting result, so the correcting accuracy is unknown.
Lari and Shabaninia [18] proposed using Neuro-Fuzzy for
the error correction of two-phase flow measurement. However,
the two-phase flow experiments were not performed and the
actual correcting accuracy is unknown.
In this paper, the neural network using back propagation
(BP) algorithm is utilized to correct the measurement errors
caused by gas–liquid two-phase flow. A gas–liquid two-phase
flow experimental rig is designed and developed to perform
two-phase flow experiments. A digital Coriolis flow transmitter
with digital drive and digital signal processing technology
is also developed to realize the drive control as well as
flow measurement and correction. Then by connecting our
transmitter with CMF025 type primary instrument, gas–liquid
two-phase flow experiments are conducted on the developed
flow rig to validate the digital drive, flow measurement, and
correction techniques.
II. G AS –L IQUID T WO -P HASE F LOW E XPERIMENTAL R IG
To correct the measurement errors of two-phase flow, the
errors should firstly be modeled. The complicated nonlinearity
and nonmonotonic behavior of the measurement errors makes
it difficult to be modeled through mechanism modeling meth-
ods but only can be modeled through experimental modeling
way, that is to find out the relationship between system
input and output based on experimental data. To obtain the
two-phase flow experimental data, a gas–liquid two-phase flow
experimental rig is designed to perform the experiments. The
schematic of the two-phase experimental rig is shown in Fig. 1.
The experimental rig is mainly consisted with a tank,
a pump, an air compressor, pipelines, Coriolis primary instru-
ments, CMF transmitters, piezometers, gas rotameters, and
2397
Fig. 2. Picture of gas–liquid two-phase flow experimental rig.
valves. Two CMF025 type primary instruments made by Micro
Motion are installed on the pipeline. The upstream primary
instrument is connected with Model 2700 transmitter made by
Micro Motion to form a reference flowmeter. The downstream
primary instrument is connected with our transmitter and is the
flowmeter under test. A picture of this rig is shown in Fig. 2.
When performing the experiments, the water is pumped
from the tank, flows through the pipelines and the two primary
instruments, then returns to the tank. The air flow is generated
by the air compressor and added to pipeline through the valve.
The direction of the arrows in Fig.1 shows the direction of
water and gas flow. Note that the air flow is added to the
pipeline that between the upstream primary instrument and
the downstream primary instrument, so that the upstream CMF
(the reference CMF) measures the single-phase (water) flow,
while the downstream CMF (the CMF under test) measures
the gas–liquid two-phase flow. By comparing the mass flow
readings of the two CMFs, the measurement errors of the
CMF under test can be obtained. The air flow added to
the downstream primary instrument is measured by the gas
reference rotameter while the true water flowrate is given by
the water reference transmitter.
The drive control and signal processing method used in
the transmitter under test will be discussed in the following
section.
III. D IGITAL CMF T RANSMITTER
The digital drive and signal processing methods are studied
for the measurement of gas–liquid two-phase flow. The digital
drive method based on MDAC and DDS is used to maintain
the flowtube oscillation, and the digital zero-crossing detection
method based on Lagrange interpolation is adopted to calculate
the frequency and phase difference of the sensor output signals
to synthesize the digital drive signal and obtain the mass
flowrate [12].
A. Digital Drive Method Based on MDAC and DDS
The block diagram of the digital drive method is shown
in Fig. 3. The frequency and phase of the drive signal is
controlled by DSP through the DDS chip, and the amplitude
2398 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 63, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2014
Fig. 3. Block diagram of digital drive method based on MDAC and DDS.
is controlled through the MDAC chip. Comparing with the
FPGA-based drive methods described in [10] and [11], this
MDAC and DDS-based drive method can synthesize the sine
wave with required frequency and phase information automati-
cally. Therefore, the large amount of computation to synthesize
the sine waves can be reduced.
The DSP collects the sensor signal and calculates its ampli-
tude, frequency, and phase continuously. Then DSP determines
the frequency, phase, and amplitude of the synthesized drive
waveform, which is required to match with the sensor sig-
nal. The initial phase value of DDS output signal must be
determined to match the phase relationship between the drive
signal and sensor signal. Before updating the drive signal,
the zero-crossing points of sensor signal are calculated and
the time delays of hardware (analog circuitry and analog-to-
digital converter (ADC)) and software (digital filter) must be
compensated so as to obtain the actual-phase value of the
sensor output signal. Then according to the phase relationship
between the drive signal and sensor signal and the delays
caused by digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and drive cir-
cuitry are also considered, the initial phase of the drive signal
is calculated.
A nonlinear amplitude control method is used to calculate
the drive gain [19]. Suppose the calculated amplitude of the
sensor signal is Amp(t). A desired amplitude value Ampd is
predetermined and the error AmpErr(t) is given as
AmpErr(t) = ln(Ampd ) − ln(Amp(t)).
The error AmpErr(t) is set into a proportional–integral (PI)
control block to calculate the gain of drive signal

K (t) = K p AmpErr(t) + K i AmpErr(t)dt (2)
where K p is the proportional coefficient and K i is the integral
coefficient.
The DSP writes the new defined frequency and phase into
the DDS, and amplitude gain into the MDAC through the
digital interface. Accordingly, the DDS outputs the sinusoid
signal with specific frequency and phase to the MDAC. This
signal is then multiplied by the amplitude gain from the digital
port. Thus, a signal containing the required frequency, phase,
and amplitude information is generated by the MDAC. At last
stage, this signal is amplified to drive the flowtubes.
B. Digital Zero-Crossing Detection Method
In [3], DFT was used to process the sensor output signals.
We also studied the Fourier-based technique, and it is really
very precise. However, the problem is that the amount of
the calculation of Fourier-based method may be some large
Fig. 4. Schematic diagram of zero-crossing detection.
because the core of our processor is DSP rather than FPGA
combined with microprocessor. In addition, when we applied
this signal processing method combined with digital drive
method to CMF using DSP chip, it was found that the algo-
rithm cannot be realized in real time. Instead, a digital zero-
crossing detection method based on Lagrange interpolation
is used to calculate the frequency and phase difference. The
water flow calibration results we have performed show that
this algorithm possesses the accuracy of 0.1% on mass flow
measurement and compared with the Fourier-based processing
method, the advantages of this approach are smaller amount
of calculation involved and good tracking speed because the
signal parameters can be obtained in one signal cycle and
measurements can be generated twice per cycle.
A schematic diagram of the zero-crossing detection is shown
in Fig. 4. As shown in Fig. 4, given the zero-crossing times
(1) t1L , t2L , t3L , t1R , t2R , t3R , the signal frequency is
 
f = 1/ t3R − t1R . (3)
The time difference and phase difference of two channels are,
respectively
 
t = t2R − t2L (4)
φ = 360 f t. (5)
In practice, DSP processes the discrete signals that are
sampled and converted by ADC. Due to signal discretization,
the possibility of sampling at zero-crossing points directly is
very small. Consequently, it is necessary to perform curve
fitting for the sampled data so as to obtain the zero-crossing
points of the signal. Here, Lagrange quadratic interpolation
method is employed to fit the curve.
Given the sampling sequence of the sensor signal x(n), if
x(n − 1)x(n) < 0, then there is a zero-crossing time point
between (n −1) and n. The Lagrange interpolating polynomial
is supposed as
x = at 2 + bt + c (6)
HOU et al.: GAS–LIQUID TWO-PHASE FLOW CORRECTION METHOD FOR DIGITAL CMF 2399

Fig. 6. Block diagram of system software.

Fig. 5. Block diagram of system hardware.

where t is time, and

a = 0.5x(n − 2) − x(n − 1) + 0.5x(n) (7)
b = − 0.5x(n − 2)(2n − 1) + x(n − 1)(2n − 2)
− 0.5x(n)(2n − 3) (8)
c = 0.5x(n − 2)(n − 1)n − x(n − 1)(n − 2)n
+ 0.5x(n)(n − 2)(n − 1). (9)
The zero-crossing points can be obtained by solving above
equations. Note that the roots out of the range of [n − 1, n]
must be discarded.

C. Digital Transmitter Based on DSP

It is necessary to select a kind of microprocessor with
high-speed processing ability and abundant peripherals
for implementing various functions of CMF transmitter,
such as calculation, control, and interfaces. Therefore, the
TMS320F28335, a DSP chip made by TI Company, which has
the processing speed of 150 MIPS and abundant peripherals,
like multichannel buffered serial port (McBSP), serial periph-
eral interface (SPI), serial communication interface (SCI),
external interface (XINTF), pulse-width modulation (PWM),
and so on, is chosen to develop a CMF transmitter.
A block diagram of the transmitter hardware is shown
in Fig. 5. This is a system configured differently from the
FPGA-based transmitter architecture in [11], and it has only
one DSP chip used to realize the signal sampling, sig-
nal processing, drive control, and human–machine interface.
Furthermore, this transmitter consists of a digital drive system,
analog signal amplifying and filtering circuits, three 24-bit
ADCs, an external static random access memory, a ferro-
electric nonvolatile random access memory (FRAM), a liquid
crystal display (LCD), a keyboard, a SCI interface, a low-
voltage supervisor, a DAC, a voltage-to-current circuit, and a
pulse outputting circuit.
A block diagram of the transmitter software is shown
in Fig. 6. It is designed with modularized scheme, and
mainly consists of a main monitoring program, an initialization
module, an interrupt module, a FRAM module, a watchdog
module, an algorithm module, an outputting module, and a
human–machine interface module.
The flowchart of the transmitter software is shown in Fig. 7.
After powered up, the main monitoring program calls the ini-
tialization module, and starts the conversion of ADC to collect
Fig. 7. Flowchart of system software.
the sensor signals. Next, DSP begins to call the algorithm to
calculate the mass flowrate and control the flowtube oscillation
continuously. During this procedure, DSP also controls the
LCD display, keyboard input, and SCI communication.
The repeatability experiments mentioned in [3] are per-
formed and the calculate results of frequency, phase difference,
and amplitude are saved per second and the experiments last
75 s (about 10 000 signal cycles) to obtain the standard devi-
ations. The repeatability results, with frequency varies from
135 to 156 Hz, phase difference varies from 0.0052° to 2.6°,
amplitude 4.3 V, are shown in Table I.
Fig. 8 shows the sensor signal under gas–liquid two-phase
flow condition, which is sampled by the oscilloscope. In Fig. 8,
the water flowrate is 10.0 L/min, and the air flowrate is
6.0 L/min.
Fig. 8(a) shows that the amplitude of the sensor signal
suddenly becomes small when the gas is just mixed. After
about 0.6 s, the amplitude of the sensor signal is gradu-
ally stabilized under the system feedback control. Fig. 8(b)
shows a partial enlarged curve of Fig. 8(a). Although the
amplitude of the sensor signal is very small, its waveform
is still the sinusoidal wave, and can be used for subsequent
computation.
2400 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 63, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2014
TABLE I
R EPEATABILITY R ESULTS
Fig. 8. Sensor signal under two-phase condition. (a) Global view of sensor
signal. (b) Partial view of sensor signal.
IV. G AS –L IQUID T WO -P HASE F LOW E XPERIMENTS
The two-phase flow measurement errors are affected by
many factors, such as liquid mass flowrate, GVF, flowtube
orientation, and geometry, which may result in different fluid
situations, like bubble flow, slugging flow, stratified flow, and
so on. In our experimental rig, the type of primary instru-
ment is CMF025, and it is installed in horizontal orientation.
Therefore, only the factors of liquid mass flowrate and GVF
are considered.
A. Apparent Liquid Mass Flowrate
The true mass flowrate is not available within the transmitter
under test itself when it is subject to two-phase flow. Therefore,
the observed (faulty) flowrate, rather than the true mass
flowrate, is considered to be an influential factor.
B. Apparent Drop in Density
In gas–liquid two-phase flow condition, GVF defined by
the proportion of gas by volume is often used to indicate the
amount of entrained gas. In practice, outside of laboratory,
on-line assessment of GVF is rarely possible without using
extra instrument. However, the observed fluid density can
provide an indirect measure of GVF by assuming that the
true liquid density is known. Knowledge of the true single-
phase liquid density can be learned online or configured by
user [14]. Transmitter calculates the fluid density and then the
drop in density, which is a monotonic indicator of GVF, can
be obtained.
Assuming the fluid density calculated through the sensor
frequency is D1 , and the true liquid density is D0 , then the
drop in density is given as
D1
Drop_ in_density = 1 − . (10)
D0
Above all, the effect of the apparent mass flowrate and drop in
density to the measurement errors is considered in our study
and the steps of the two-phase flow experiments are as follows.
1) Change the open degree of the liquid valve 1 to get a
proper liquid flowrate. The flowrate value can be read
from the reference CMF.
2) Vary the gas valve 2 to get a proper gas flowrate. Both
the parameter of drop in density calculated by the CMF
under test and the gas rotameter reading can indicate the
amount of entrained gas.
3) Record the true mass flowrate, true liquid density from
reference CMF, and record the gas flowrate from gas
rotameter. Then, the true GVF and true mixture density
can be obtained. Before calculating the true GVF, the
gas flowrate mixes into the flowtube under test should
be estimated from the gas rotameter reading according to
the pressure and temperature at the inlet of the flowtube
under test and the gas rotameter. But one defect in
our experimental rig is that there is no space left for
installing another piezometer for the pressure measure-
ment at the inlet of the flowtube under test. Therefore,
the assumption that the gas flowrate mixes into the
flowtube under test equals the gas rotameter reading is
made. This assumption may cause measurement errors
for the true GVF and true mixture density, but it does
not influence the validation of two-phase flow correction
methods, for the experiments of sampling training data
and online correction are performed under the same
condition.
4) When the experiment begins, a data acquisition board
made by National Instruments is used to count the pulse
number, which stands for the mass flowrate from the
reference CMF and the CMF under test simultaneously.
When the experiment ends, the data acquisition board
stops counting. By comparing the pulse numbers of the
two CMFs, the mass flow error of the CMF under test
can be obtained. During this process, the CMF under
test also uploads the data, like apparent mass flowrate,
apparent mixture density, apparent density drop, signal
frequency and temperature, and so on, to PC for analysis
through SCI interface continuously. The uploaded data
sequence of apparent mixture density is averaged and
then compared with the true mixture density and the
density error of the CMF under test is obtained. Mean-
while, the data sequence of apparent mass flowrate and
apparent density drop is also averaged and the average
values combined with the mass flow error or density
error are used to train the network. After the network
has been trained, the raw data sequence can be treated
as new samples to validate the network.
5) Repeat 2)–4), change the gas flowrate to other values
and record the mass flow errors and density errors of
the CMF under test with the same liquid flowrate but
different gas flowrate.
HOU et al.: GAS–LIQUID TWO-PHASE FLOW CORRECTION METHOD FOR DIGITAL CMF 2401

Fig. 11. Structure of the feed-forward network.

The input layer contains two nodes, p1 and p2 , which

Fig. 9. Raw mass flow error under two-phase flow.
represent the liquid flowrate and drop in density, respectively.
The output is the measurement error, which is the flowrate
error or density error.
The output of hidden neuron is given as
 r 
a1i = f 1 w1i j p j + b1i i = 1, 2, 3 . . . , s1 (11)
j =1

where r is the number of input nodes and r = 2; s1 is the

number of the hidden layer nodes; w1i j is the input to hidden
layer weights; b1i is the hidden layer biases; and
1
f 1(n) = . (12)
1 + e−n
For output layer, the output of the node is given as
 s2

a2k = f 2 w2ki a1i + b2k k = 1, 2, 3 . . . , s2 (13)
i=1
where w2ki is the hidden to input layer weights; b2k is the
Fig. 10. Raw mixture density error under two-phase flow. output layer biases; s2 is the number of output layer nodes;
and
6) Repeat 1)–5), change the liquid flowrate to other values
and record the mass flow errors and density errors of f 2(n) = n. (14)
the CMF under test with different liquid flowrate and
The mean square performance function is given as
different gas flowrate.
1
s2
The experimental data is shown in Figs. 9 and 10. The
E(W, B) = (tk − a2k )2 (15)
results show that, for CMF025 type primary instrument, when 2
k=1
the liquid flowrate varies from 1.5 to 15.5 kg/min and the GVF
varies from 0% to 30%, the mass flow error and the density where tk is the training target.
error can reach to −20%. The Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithm is applied for
the training of network to short the training time and avoid
local optimum.
V. F EED -F ORWARD N EURAL N ETWORK The experimental data obtained in Section IV, shown in
U SING BP A LGORITHM Figs. 9 and 10, is used as the training data. The input of the
After the experimental data has been collected, a feed- network is
q
forward neural network is used for the prediction and correc- P = [Flow1 Flow2 . . . . . . Flowq ; Dd1 Dd2 . . . . . . Dd ]. (16)
tion of two-phase flow measurement errors. It has been proved
that anyone of continuous functions in a closed interval can The training target is
be approximated by the feed-forward neural network with one
T = [Err1 Err2 . . . . . . Errq ] (17)
hidden layer. Thus, the feed-forward network consists of one
input layer, one hidden layer, and one output layer is used. where Flow and Dd are the liquid flowrate and drop in density,
The training accuracy is improved by adding hidden neurons. Err is the corresponding measurement error, and q is the
The structure of the feed-forward network is shown in Fig. 11. number of sampling data.
2402 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 63, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2014

Fig. 13. Testing results of RBF network.

Fig. 12. Testing results of BP algorithm-based feed-forward network.

Increasing the number of hidden layer nodes can improve

the training accuracy, but too many hidden nodes can result
in long training time and poor performance of unseen input
data. The experienced formula for determining the number of
hidden nodes is given as
√
s1 = n i + n o + m (18)

where n i is the number of input nodes and n o is the number of

output nodes, m is a constant whose value is between 1 and 10.
Based on this formula, the final number of hidden nodes is
chosen as 15 by simulation. The training goal of mean square
error is set as 0.5.
Here, the RBF network is also simulated to make compar-
ison. The simulation results show that to achieve the same
training accuracy, the RBF network needs much more nodes,
for example, when the number of hidden layer nodes is chosen
as 25, the training goal only can achieve 2.4. The increasing
of nodes may increase the amount of computation in the
following online correction. What’s more, when testing the
network using the data sequence uploaded from the CMF
under test discussed in Section IV, it is found that the RBF
network has a larger prediction error than that of BP algorithm-
based feed-forward network, as shown in Figs. 12 and 13.
From Figs. 12 and 13, the testing errors of BP algorithm-
based feed-forward network are mostly within ±2%, while
the testing errors of RBF network are mostly within ±4%
when the number of hidden layer nodes is 25 and simulation
results show that increasing the number of layer nodes does
not improve the testing results too much. Therefore, the
BP algorithm-based feed-forward network is selected for the
following online correction.
VI. O NLINE C ORRECTION FOR T WO -P HASE
F LOW M EASUREMENT
After training the neural network, the parameter of the net-
work is set into the transmitter program for online prediction
and correction of measurement errors.
Fig. 14. Steps of two-phase flow measurement and correction.
When applying the correction for two-phase flow measure-
ment, first, calculate the sensor frequency and phase differ-
ence, and then the raw mass flowrate can be obtained. Second,
calculate the density of the mixture fluid, and the drop in
density can be calculated according to (10). Third, these two
parameters, raw mass flowrate and drop in density, are set into
the neural network as the input, after calculation, the output of
network, that is the predicted mass flow error or the predicted
density error can be obtained. Finally, correct the raw mass
flow and mixture density according to the predicted error. The
steps are shown in Fig. 14.
Repeat the experiment in Section IV and the result of
online correction for two-phase flow measurement is shown
as Figs. 15 and 16. Note that to validate the prediction ability
of network for new inputs, the selected liquid flowrate is
in the range of training data but different from the training
data.
Figs. 15 and 16 show that, for CMF025 type primary instru-
ment, when the liquid flowrate varies from 3 to 15 kg/min
and the GVF varies from 0% to 30%, the corrected mass flow
errors can be kept within ±3.5%, while the corrected density
errors can be kept within ±1.5%.
HOU et al.: GAS–LIQUID TWO-PHASE FLOW CORRECTION METHOD FOR DIGITAL CMF
Fig. 15. Corrected mass flow error under two-phase flow.
Fig. 16. Corrected mixture density error under two-phase flow.
VII. C ONCLUSION
1) A gas–liquid two-phase flow experimental rig is devel-
oped in this paper. On this rig, two CMFs are installed on
the pipeline. One CMF is used as a liquid flow reference
meter, while the other is the CMF under test for two-
phase flow measurement. By comparing with the ref-
erence CMF reading, the two-phase flow measurement
errors of the CMF under test can be obtained.
2) A CMF transmitter is developed with digital drive
and digital signal processing technology based on
TMS320F28335 chip. The digital wave synthesis drive
method is implemented using MDAC and DDS to
maintain the flowtube oscillation under two-phase flow
condition. The digital zero-crossing detection method
based on Lagrange interpolation is adopted to synthesize
the drive signal and measure the mass flowrate.
3) The BP algorithm-based feed-forward neural network
is used for the measurement error prediction and cor-
rection. The LM algorithm is applied to train the net-
work to reduce the training time and avoid the local
2403
optimum. Comparing with RBF network, to achieve
the same training accuracy, BP algorithm-based feed-
forward network needs less neuron than that of RBF, and
this largely reduces the computation power consumption
during online correction.
4) The gas–liquid two-phase flow experiment is performed
on the experimental rig by connecting the transmitter
under test with the CMF025 type primary instrument.
The online correction result shows that when water
flowrate varies from 3 to 15 kg/min, with GVF up to
25%, the flowrate errors can be kept within ±3.5%,
while density errors can be kept within ±1.5%.
5) However, limitation of the presented work still exists.
There is no piezometer to measure the pressure in the
flowtube and the two-phase flow experiment is only
applied for CMF025 type primary instrument under
gas–water condition. The experiments with other type
primary instruments and other application situations, like
gas–oil and oil–water, have not been performed. In our
future work, we will improve the experimental rig and
take the two-phase experiments with different primary
instruments under different application situations to fur-
ther validate our transmitter.
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1998.
Qi-Li Hou received the bachelor’s and master’s
degrees from the Hefei University of Technology,
Hefei, China, in 2008 and 2011, respectively, where
he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the
School of Electrical and Automation Engineering.
His current research interests include electrical
measurement technology.
Ke-Jun Xu received the Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering and automation from the China Univer-
sity of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China, in
1988.
He has been with the School of Electrical and
Automation Engineering, Hefei University of Tech-
nology, Hefei, China, since 1989. He was a Professor
in 1994. He has authored 14 books in Chinese, more
than 260 papers in domestic and international peri-
odicals in Chinese or English, and obtained 29 Chi-
nese patents. His current research interests include
sensor technology, process instrumentation, and digital signal processing.
Min Fang received the bachelor’s and master’s
degrees from the Hefei University of Technology,
Hefei, China, in 2008 and 2011, respectively, where
he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the
School of Electrical and Automation Engineering.
His current research interests include electrical
measurement technology.
Yan Shi received the bachelor’s degree from the
Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China, in
2012, where she is currently pursuing the master’s
degree with the School of Electrical and Automation
Engineering.
Her current research interests include measurement
technology and digital signal processing applica-
tions.
Bo-Bo Tao received the bachelor’s degree from the
Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China, in
2012, where he is currently pursuing the master’s
degree with the School of Electrical and Automation
Engineering.
His current research interests include measurement
technology and digital signal processing applica-
tions.
Rong-Wei Jiang received the bachelor’s degree
from the Hefei University of Technology, Hefei,
China, in 2012, where he is currently pursuing the
master’s degree with the School of Electrical and
Automation Engineering.
His current research interests include measurement
technology and digital signal processing applica-
tions.