CFD-Aided Investigation of Combined Flow Conditioners for Gas Ultrasonic Flow Meter

Stable and fully developed gas flow field is crucial for realizing accurate measurement of gas ultrasonicflow meter. To reduce the flow field distortion, a flow conditioner is usually used. However, the traditionalmonotype flow conditioner can only improve the flow field distribution partly. The measurement accuracy of thetransit time ultrasonic flow meter is still affected because of its serious flow field distortion in the complex pipelineconditions. In this paper, to further improve the flow field distribution, a combined conditioner is investigated.The combined flow conditioner is composed of fan-shaped section, turbulent mixing cavity, and honeycomb-shapedsection. The effects of fan blade angle and cavity length on the flow field of the DN50 flow meter are studied usingcomputational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Simulation results indicate that compared with the monotypeconditioner, the combined conditioner has better performance on effectively reducing the swirl and turbulence andproviding more stable and repetitive velocity profiles. Experiments also validate the effectiveness of the combinedconditioner. The flow meter with the combined conditioner has better repeatability of less than 0.2%, which isbetter than those of the monotype conditioners under the same conditions. This work is very useful for accuratemeasurement of gas ultrasonic flow meter, especially for the complex pipeline conditions.

A method to avoid the cycle-skip phenomenon in time-of-flight determination for ultrasonic flow measurement

The double-threshold method has been widely used in ultrasonic flow measurement to determine time-of-flight(TOF)due to its low cost and ease of implementation.Performance of this method is negatively affected by the cycle-skip phenomenon which occurs frequently under inconstant working conditions,especially varied fluid temperature.This paper proposes a method to suppress the phenomenon to facilitate reliable determination of TOF in ultrasonic flow measurement.First,the double-threshold method is used to generate a feature point to segment the signal.Second,based on the correlation coefficient and signal power,judgement factors of individual signal periods are calculated to determine signal onset.Finally,a valid zero crossing which has a constant lag from the onset is selected to determine the TOF.Thus,the cycle-skip phenomenon is suppressed.Two additional modifications are proposed to eliminate the influence of varied signal frequency and low sampling rate.The proposed method was validated by an experiment based on an ultrasonic water flow sensor.Results showed that the frequently appearing cycle-skip phenomenon can be successfully suppressed by the proposed method.

Design and Implementation of an Ultrasonic Heat Meter Based on MSP430F437

Flowing with the reform of the hot water heating method in China, heat meter will enter into households in the near future. A portable ultrasonic heat meter is designed in this paper. The meter uses chip microprocessor MSP430F437 as the data process core, and uses ultrasonic flow sensor to measure flow rate of the hot water, and capture input and output temperatures of the hot water using the thermal resistance sensor Ptl000, and then household energy consumption is calculated via temperature difference between input temperature and output temperature of the hot water multiplied by volume of hot water that is calculated though flow rate integration of hot water. In order to test the performance of the proposed heat meter, experiments is carried out. Both the temperature and flow measurement results satisfy the requirements of accuracy and the heat meter is effective in the heat measurement.

An assessment on the wideband and narrowband methods for ultrasonic blood flow measurements

A comparison study on the ultrasonic blood flow estimation methods is carried out in this paper. The methods are divided into two classes-narrowband and wideband techniques.The pulsed Doppler systems and the autocorrelation methods are essentially the narrowband estAnators. They give the results with low velocity resolution and probably the aliased spectrum.The wider the frequency band of the signals, the worse the results. Time domain crosscorrelation technique, wideband makimum likelihood estimation and 2D Fourier transform method are three wideband techniques. The high velocity resolution and the ability of anti-aliasing are shown by these wideband estimation strategies.

Experimental Modelling of the Impact of a DC Magnetic Field on the Melt Flow in a Continuous Casting Mould

This paper describes experimental investigations of flow structures and related transport processes in the continuous casting mould under the influence of an external DC magnetic field at laboratory scale.Experimental results will be presented here which have been obtained using a physical model(mini-LIMMCAST)operating with the low melting point alloy GaInSn.According to the concept of the electromagnetic brake the impact of a DC magnetic field on the outlet flow from the Submerged Entry Nozzle(SEN)has been studied up to Hartmann numbers of about 400.The Ultrasound-Doppler-Velocimetry(UDV)was applied for measurements of the flow pattern in the mould.Local conductivity anemometers were used to measure the turbulent quantities of the flow.The effect of the magnetic field on the flow structure turned out to be manifold and rather complex.The magnetic field causes a deflection of the jet,at which the respective exit angle from the nozzle ports becomes more flat.Thus,both the penetration depth of the discharging flow into the lower part of the mould and the impinging velocity of the jet onto the side wall are reduced.A significant return flow occurs in the adjacent regions of the jet.Specific vortices are formed with axes being aligned with the magnetic field direction.Such vortical structures are typical for quasi-two-dimensional magneto-hydrodynamic(MHD)flows.The flow measurements do not manifest a general braking effect which would be expected as an overall damping of the flow velocity and the related fluctuations all-over the mould volume.Variations of the wall conductivity showed a striking impact on the resulting flow structures.