numerical modeling of three-phase flow through a venturi meter using the lssvm algorithm

One of the challenging problems in the oil and gas industry is accurate and reliable multiphase flow rate measurement in a three-phase flow. the application of methods with minimized uncertainty is required in the industry. previously developed correlations for two-phase flow are complex and not capable of three-phase flow. hence phase behavior identification in different conditions of designing and modeling of three-phase flow is important. numerous laboratory and theoretical studies have been done to describe the venturi multiphase flow meter in both horizontal and vertical flow. however, it is not possible to select the measurement devices for all similar conditions. in this study, a new venturi model is developed to implement in simulink/matlab for predicting the mass flow rate of gas, water, and oil. this model is simple and semi-linear. several classified configurations of three-phase flow are simulated using computational fluid dynamics analysis to get hydrodynamics parameters of the flows to use as inputs of the model. the obtained data is used as a test and train data in the least squares support vector machine (lssvm) algorithm. the pressure drop and mass flow rate of gas, oil, and water are calculated with the lssvm method. two tuning parameters of lssvm, namely γ and 𝜎², are obtained as 1150954 and 0.4384, 53.9199 and 0.18163, 8.8714 and 0.14424, and 1003913.2214 and 0.74742 for the pressure drop, the mass flow rate of oil, gas mass flow rate, and the water mass flow rate, respectively. developed models are found to have an average relative error of 5.81%, 6.31%, and 2.58% for gas, oil, and water, respectively.