Distributed acoustic sensor based sand content detection in solid-liquid two-phase flow

We demonstrated a real time sand content measurement in solid-liquid flow by employing an optical fiber distribution acoustic sensor (DAS) system, in which the sand content concentration with range of 0 wt.%-0.14 wt.% is measured by detecting acoustic emission (AE) signal generated by sand particles impacting the pipe wall in sand-water two-phase flows. The standard deviation (SD) of statistical method is used to characterize different sand conditions instead of traditional frequency domain analysis. The experiment results showed that the sand concentration has a linear relationship with the standard deviation (SD) of the AE signals, which show the potential of this method in long distance and non-invasive pipeline sand content monitoring. (C) 2020 The Author(s)