access icon free Effect mechanism of non-ideal flow field on acoustic field in gas ultrasonic flowmeter

Gas ultrasonic flowmeters are widely used in natural gas measurement. In order to achieve high accuracy, it is meaningful to study interaction mechanism between flow field and acoustic field. In this study, effects of non-ideal flow on ultrasonic propagation are discussed. Firstly, a flow-acoustic coupling model is established based on COMSOL and its feasibility is verified by experiments. In order to be more in line with actual working condition, flow field is obtained by CFD simulation instead of theoretical formula calculation. Secondly, with this method, two typical non-ideal flows which often exist in real application are mainly analysed, including vortices near transducers and bend flows. The acoustic trajectory offsets, transit time, sound pressure and measurement errors are compared with results of ideal flow field. It is shown that errors will increase 10% caused by vortices near transducers, and increase 13% caused by bend flows. Besides, when passing through vortices near transducers with negative flow, trajectory offsets are opposite to flow direction. Finally, some suggestions for flowmeter design are proposed to improve measurement performance of gas ultrasonic flowmeter.

Inspec keywords: ultrasonic propagation; computational fluid dynamics; ultrasonic measurement; vortices; flowmeters; measurement errors; flow measurement; ultrasonic transducers

Other keywords: transducers; vortices; gas ultrasonic flowmeter; negative flow; ideal flow field; bend flows; acoustic field; COMSOL; CFD simulation; sound pressure; measurement errors; acoustic trajectory offsets; flow-acoustic coupling model; nonideal flow field; ultrasonic propagation; transit time; interaction mechanism; natural gas measurement

Subjects: Measurement instrumentation and techniques for fluid dynamics; Measurement; General fluid dynamics theory, simulation and other computational methods; Measurement by acoustic techniques; Applied fluid mechanics; Rotational flow, vortices, buoyancy and other flows involving body forces; Fluid mechanics and aerodynamics (mechanical engineering)

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