Measuring slugging bed dynamics with acoustic sensors

We describe experimental observations of slugging bed dynamics with passive acoustic sensors. Our results indicate that acoustic signals contain both similar and complementary information relative to dynamic pressure signals. We find that selective preprocessing of acoustic signals is a key step in separating information about microscale and macroscale processes. With such preprocessing, both linear and nonlinear dynamical features are apparent. Nonlinear features appear to be especially useful for practical diagnostics.