Influence of Probe Local Flow Field Distortion on Measurement Results of Ultrasonic Flowmeter

W. L. Chen, C. H. Li, J. Mu

Abstract

The installation of the intrusive probe will disturb the internal flow field inside the ultrasonic flowmeter, which will affect the measurement results. Probe protruded into the flow or recessed into the wall is one of the most important uncertainty sources of ultrasonic transit-time flowmeters. There are three ways to install theprobe of the ultrasonic flowmeter in the pipeline: fully convex installation (the probe protrudes into the pipeline),fully concave installation (the probe is installed to form a depression on the pipe wall) and tangent installation(the center line of the probe is flush with the pipe wall, a part of the probe protrudes from the pipe, and a depression is also formed on the pipe wall).In this paper, for the small and medium-diameter ultrasonic flowmeters with double-sided 8-channel arrangement, numerical simulations are carried out under the fully convex, fully concave and tangent probe installation modes, respectively. By analyzing the flow field distribution near the probe and the change of the velocity profile on the path line, the physical mechanism of the influence of the flow separation caused by the mainstream flow near the probe on the measurement results of the ultrasonic flowmeter is revealed. Then the influence of probe disturbance on the measurement results of ultrasonic flowmeter under different pressure and flow rate was analyzed by experiments, and the error correction model is proposed according to the experimental results. The research contents provide a theoretical basis for the installation and use of ultrasonic flowmeter.

Keywords

Ultrasonic flowmeter; Probe protrusion; Probe recess; Probe tangent; Computational fluid dynamic

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IMEKO-TC9-2019-008.pdf

DOI

10.21014/tc9-2022.008

IMEKO TC

TC9 - Flow Measurement

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