A range of technical challenges have been overcome in the design, construction and commissioning of the test facility thanks to the significant collaborative effort between the University of Kent, Krohne Ltd, Tianjin University and North China Electric Power University. This facility is capable of providing single-phase (liquid or gas) or two-phase (liquid/gas) CO2 flows in one-inch bore, horizontal and vertical pipelines with pressures up to 72 bar. The precision weighing system as an integral part of the facility provides an uncertainty of 0.06% (k=2) for CO2 liquid flows. The reference Coriolis flowmeters equipped on the facility offer uncertainties of 0.16% (k=2) for CO2 liquid flows and 0.3% (k=2) for CO2 gas flows. Different two-phase flow regimes such as stratified, bubbly, plug and slug flows can be created in the test sections. Impurity gases can also be injected into the pipelines to assess their impact on the performance of CO2 flowmeters and pipeline materials.
The Kent team have recently conducted a test programme on the facility to assess the performance of their CO2 flow metering technology. The results obtained have demonstrated that Coriolis flowmeters incorporating intelligent data fusion algorithms are capable of providing mass flow measurements of CO2 with errors less than ±1.5% under two-phase flow conditions. The flowmeters have achieved errors within ±0.15% and ±0.25%, respectively, for single-phase liquid or gaseous CO2. These results indicate that the developed CO2 flow metering technology can meet the 1.5% uncertainty requirements set by the EU-ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme).