Theoretical study on measuring steam dryness using matrix conductivity method in steam injection pipelines

Steam dryness is an important parameter for evaluating the quality of the wet steam injected in heavy oil thermal recovery engineering. The matrix conductivity method is a new steam dryness measurement method based on the wire-mesh measurement principle. Steam dryness is measured indirectly by measuring the gas-liquid distribution in the pipeline. The relationship between the gas-liquid area and steam dryness is derived by combining thermodynamic knowledge to establish a dryness calculation model. The electric field simulation was performed in Ansys Electronics to analyze the effects of wire-mesh layer spacing, liquid position, and size on the electric field measured between layers. A measurement circuit was designed and a simple test platform was built to conduct static measurement tests to obtain the voltage measurement interval. Analyze the errors and optimize the process using a bilinear interpolation method. The contribution of this study is to provide a theoretical basis for the subsequent application of the matrix conductivity method and steam dryness measurement.