Development of a Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PVT) Measurement Technique for the Experimental Investigation of Oil Drops Behavior in Dispersed Oil-Water Two-Phase Flow within a Centrifugal Pump Impeller

Resumo

by Rafael Franklin Lázaro de Cerqueira, Rodolfo Marcilli Perissinotto, William Monte Verde, Jorge Luiz Biazussi, Marcel Souza de Castro, Antonio Carlos Bannwart. presented at 26th International Congress of Mechanicel Engineering (COBEM 2021), November 2021.

Abstract

The objective of the current work is to present the development of a robust Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) software for the analysis of oil drops behaviour in dispersed oil-water two-phase flow within a centrifugal pump impeller. The oil drop tracking was realized through high-speed camera acquisitions in a transparent pump prototype, which enabled the visualization of oil drops dispersed in water in all the impeller channels. The PTV software is based on a U-NET and standard convolutional networks, which detects oil drop contours in each frame of the high-speed camera videos. In order to assess the PTV software capabilities, a single experiment was analyzed in detail. In this experiment, due to the pump rotation speed and the water flow rate, intense transient fluctuations on the dispersed oil size distribution were observed in the recorded acquisitions. This procedure completely characterized instantaneous drop dynamics in the impeller channel. According to the results, there is a strong dependence between the oil injection flow rate, the instantaneous drop size distribution and the average velocity field.