Segmentation of ultrafast X-ray tomographed gas-liquid flows in a vertical pipe at different flow regimes

At the Institute of Fluid Dynamics at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf the ultrafast electron beam X-ray computed tomography was developed in the last years to investigate two-phase flows. The tomography system works according to the scanned electron beam principle. In a recent study we investigated different gas-liquid flow regimes in a vertical pipe test rig at the TOPFLOW thermal hydraulic test facility. The study contains experiments of gas-liquid flow regimes varied with different superficial velocities for both phases and different flow directions. The obtained data is required for understanding fundamental physics of flow phenomena and for improving and validating of models for flow simulation codes.
To extract the needed data from the 3D gray value array, a new segmentation algorithm is developed. This algorithm bases on bubble detection by pixel agglomeration. The results are compared with threshold and gradient methods using two different bubble phantoms and real two-phase flow measurements. The new algorithm shows the best qualitative and quantitative results.