Title
Measurement of Pipe and Liquid Parameters Using the Beam Steering Capabilities of Array-Based Clamp-On Ultrasonic Flow Meters
Author
Massaad, J.
van Neer, P.L.M.J.
van Willigen, D.M.
Pertijs, M.A.P.
de Jong, N.
Verweij, M.D.
Publication year
2022
Abstract
Clamp-on ultrasonic flow meters (UFMs) are installed on the outside of the pipe wall. Typically, they consist of two single-element transducers mounted on angled wedges, which are acoustically coupled to the pipe wall. Before flow metering, the transducers are placed at the correct axial position by manually moving one transducer along the pipe wall until the maximum amplitude of the relevant acoustic pulse is obtained. This process is time-consuming and operator-dependent. Next to this, at least five parameters of the pipe and the liquid need to be provided manually to compute the flow speed. In this work, a method is proposed to obtain the five parameters of the pipe and the liquid required to compute the flow speed. The method consists of obtaining the optimal angles for different wave travel paths by varying the steering angle of the emitted acoustic beam systematically. Based on these optimal angles, a system of equations is built and solved to extract the desired parameters. The proposed method was tested experimentally with a custom-made clamp-on UFM consisting of two linear arrays placed on a water-filled stainless steel pipe. The obtained parameters of the pipe and the liquid correspond very well with the expected (nominal) values. Furthermore, the performed experiment also demonstrates that a clamp-on UFM based on transducer arrays can achieve self-alignment without the need to manually move the transducers.
Subject
beam alignment
clamp-on ultrasonic flow meter
self-calibration
transducer arrays
Flow measurement
Flowmeters
Transducers
Walls (structural partitions)
Beam alignments
Clamp-on ultrasonic flow meter
Five parameters
Flow speed
Measurements of
Optimal angle
Pipe walls
Self calibration
Transducer array
Ultrasonic flow meters
Liquids
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http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d41d9eb3-b120-40a5-9c99-65fcb02e7cf1
TNO identifier
972829
Publisher
MDPI
ISSN
1424-8220
Source
Sensors, 22 (22)
Document type
article