Abstract Background Understanding the volume fraction of water-oil-gas three-phase flow is of significant importance in oil and gas industry. Purpose The current research attempts to indicate the ability of adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to forecast the volume fractions in a water-oil-gas three-phase flow system. Method The current investigation devotes to measure the volume fractions in the stratified three-phase flow, on the basis of a dual-energy metering system consisting of the 152Eu and 137Cs and one NaI detector using ANFIS. The summation of volume fractions is equal to 100% and is also a constant, and this is enough for the ANFIS just to forecast two volume fractions. In the paper, three ANFIS models are employed. The first network is applied to forecast the oil and water volume fractions. The next to forecast the water and gas volume fractions, and the last to forecast the gas and oil volume fractions. For the next step, ANFIS networks are trained based on numerical simulation data from MCNP-X code. Results The accuracy of the nets is evaluated through the calculation of average testing error. The average errors are then compared. The model in which predictions has the most consistency with the numerical simulation results is selected as the most accurate predictor model. Based on the results, the best ANFIS net forecasts the water and gas volume fractions with the mean error of less than 0.8%. Conclusion The proposed methodology indicates that ANFIS can precisely forecast the volume fractions in a water-oil-gas three-phase flow system.
