Current status and limitations of multiphase flow metering

Publisher Summary: This chapter deals with the current status and limitations of multiphase flow metering (MFM) technology. MFM has come a long way to represent a discipline per se, within the oil and gas industry and fitting with other technologies toward global field-wide solutions, but it has not yet achieved its full potential. Accuracy is the degree of conformity of a measure to a standard or a true value. Based on the central limit theorem, the random error has a Gaussian distribution. The flow rate from MFM's is obtained as a combination of different flow parameters. This implies that there will be a propagation of measurement errors in the calculation algorithm that could have a strong influence on the overall error in the prediction of the flow rate. Increasing the sampling frequency and the metering interval can help reduce the uncertainty due to fluctuations of key flow parameters. Flow regimes are an important input to flow modelling that is performed virtually by all MFM's to compute the phase flow rates from raw measurements. For a given metering principle and procedure to interpret the sensors signals, the measurement accuracy can vary considerably depending on the quality of the sensors signals. Traditionally, the standards for petroleum measurements are based on the separation of the phases and this approach is not applicable to MFM