Becuase my family has made our living from the measurement industry; feel lucky to have
the wealth of knowledge most individuals take lifetimes to aquire. So we feel it is our duty to share this wealth with our customers and interested persons at no addtional cost.
So In order for our measurement industy maintain its integrity in the future we
believe its nessary to help our customers understand what they are responsible for, if they need it. Because most of the time the customers that need it really don't know where to start, we
provide the following page to assist them and the public on what we do and how things work. The goal is to align our goals with our customers in order to reduce fustration of poor results from our
services.
Lately our industries age gap and experience gaps have gotten wider,
causing a vacuum of knowledge in our area. For this reason we provide our new younger customers
with detailed information on the fundamentals and advanced concepts associated with measurement of liquids.
Below are various videos and information about newer metering technolgies and explaination of
successful proving methods.
Utrasonic Flow Meters cont.
Metering systems can also have valves, strainers, elbows, tees, and headers upstream of the meter. These elements can distort the flow profile and introduce swirl
and crossflow upstream of the meter. Since we are measuring velocity, any change created by these elements will affect the measurement accuracy. Flow conditions are used to minimize these affects but
a robust integration method with crossflow compensation is also important to optimize performance.
Proving recommendations In-situ proving at regular intervals is recommended to maintain optimum measurement accuracy. Ultrasonic meters, as previously stated, are
like turbine meters in that they infer the volumetric throughput by measuring the velocity over the flow area. For low viscosity products the velocity profile is flat and the flow velocity is nearly
constant over the flow area, except for a region near the pipe wall. Therefore, the average stream velocity can be measured at any point except near the pipe wall. As the viscosity increases and/or
the flow decreases, the flow profile becomes parabolic . Maximum velocity is at the center of the pipe and the velocity decreases gradually to zero at the pipe wall. To determine the average stream
velocity for this type of profile, the stream velocity is measured at several selective points and the velocities are integrated with an algorithm to determine the average velocity. The relationship
between velocity and viscosity is defined by Reynolds Number which is the ratio of flow rate to the meter size and the viscosity {Re No ≈ (flow rate)/(meter size x viscosity) } A select few
multi-path ultrasonic meters use velocity from four chordal paths with the VPC to accurately determine the average velocity over the complete flow and viscosity range.
Knowing flow velocity along with the cross sectional area of the pipe you get the volume flow rate. The meter's transmitter is used to process this data
and determine the proportional frequency to output based on these measurements. This causes a lag in flow rate indication. Depending on meter manufacture will depend on the latency of the pulses
representing that flow rate. Because actual flow rate is constantly changing, these meters have difficulties adjusting to actual flow rate change in a system. If the time it takes to sample the
meters pulses is under a few seconds, even in ideal conditions these meters are known to not expected to achieve traditional repeatability requirements(API uncertainty .027%). The industry practice
is to use larger prover volumes to achieve repeatability between proving passes(runs), however with most situations this is not feasible because of the foot print needed and life time cost
of such large pipe provers. With our small volume provers and turbine master meter setup we are able to achieve the same results as a larger pipe prover, using the master meter method.
Turbine flow meters
An inferred measurement of the flow velocity using a fixed rotor with blades, the flowing fluid is directed into the blades via upstream flow cone. The blades are
angled so when the flow contacts them they spin the rotor, this is called the driving force. As the blades spin around the the inside of the pipe they pass over an area where a magnetic pick off coil
creates a magnetic field, which is mounted outside of the meter. When the blade passes over the pick off it disrupts the magnetic field producing an alternating current pulse. If the turbine rotor
has 5 blades, it will produce 5 pulses for every single rotation of the rotor. Because the rotation of the rotor is proportional to the fluids velocity, and knowing the cross sectional area of the
pipe, we can determine volume flow rate.