Flow Measurement
Introduction
Accurate flow measurement has become increasingly important for many key industrial sectors including oil & gas, aerospace, automotive, chemical and pharmaceutical process industries, as well as various military and government operations. While ultrasonic flow measurement techniques offer numerous advantages such as non-intrusive design, wide turndown ratio, and fast response time, there still remain many challenges that need to be overcome. Our research is focussed on making ultrasonic measurement techniques both accurate & reliable, especially for applications in gas flow, disturbed flows, or clamp-on measurements with challenging pipe materials and geometries. We have in-house capabilities in flow measurement from the modelling and design phase, through to flow meter construction and testing. This page is about the facilities we operate, for more information on our flow measurement research see the flow measurement research page.
Air Flow Facility
A dedicated air flow test-bench experiment has been set up to enable transit time ultrasonic data collection under varied flow conditions. The test setup comprises of pairs of conventional air coupled ultrasonic transducers, with nominal operating frequency of 200kHz, positioned strategically on a pipe (approx. 6 inch inner diameter) in such a way that ultrasonic signal (both up and down stream) from a variety of propagation paths is recorded. This multi-path measurement approach is extremely important to mitigate against the presence of swirls or any asymmetric flow profiles that are typically found in a gas flow. The flow itself is created by a powerful suction fan down-stream from the metering setup and varied flow profiles are introduced by the way of introducing bends and pipe size variations up-stream.
Air flow test-bench schematic
Large Water Flow Facility
A dedicated closed loop water flow facility was obtained from Prof Roger Baker and rebuilt at Warwick at the end of summer 2013. The following timelapse video shows the progress of the build over a period of a couple of weeks.
Timelapse Video. Few flowrig installation days.
CAD fly through video of the CIU water flow rig, with a prototype wetted ultrasonic flow meter using low cost transducers, done as part of a final year undergraduate project - an excellent example and indication of the quality of work that our undergraduates can produce. [Thanks to the group - Lewis McGregor, Franek Zajak, James Fotheringham, Nikal Gulati, Jamie Grifferty, Seetal Pankhania, Dan Willoughby and Dan Edwards]
Small Water Flow Facility
A small gravity-fed flow facility offers very stable, slow flows for testing flow meters with small diameter pipes, typically 15-22 mm domestic copper. The facility uses a gravimetric system as a reference for high precision over a wide range of flow rates, and has the capability to monitor water temperature.
A computer aided design model of the small flow facility with the testing location marked with the red box.
Simulation Capabilities
We have in-house capabilities to perform ultrasound and electromagnetic finite element modelling, as well as creating bespoke simulation software in MATLAB or Python. Previous bespoke software projects have included Huygens models, ray-tracing simulations of flow meters using computational fluid dynamics data, and various frequency-domain models. We often perform computational modelling for industrial applications, which can be requested through the CIU by contacting Steve Dixon.
Articles showing some of our modelling capabilities (both for flow measurement and otherwise) are linked below.
Transducer Design for Clamp-on Guided Wave Flow Measurement in Thin-Walled Pipes
Clamp-On Measurements of Fluid Flow in Small-Diameter Metal Pipes Using Ultrasonic Guided Waves
Oil Filled Flexural Ultrasonic Transducers for Resilience in Environments of Elevated Pressure