Analyzing the Fluid Flow of Transit-Time Ultrasonic Flowmeter with Image Processing Technique and Developing a Quality Metric Depending on Pipe Profile

Abstract

The ultrasonic transit-time method measures the velocity and quantity of fluids in circular type pipes by using the difference of transit time between the ultrasonic pulses propagating with and against the flow direction. This method gives the average velocity of the fluid along a particular acoustic path. At least two ultrasonic transducers are used for an acoustic path. The multipath ultrasonic flowmeters have more acoustic paths. In this paper, the acoustic path between two transducers is described as pixels for the turbulent flow and formed a flow map for ideal flow conditions such as no elbow or bend depending on pipe profile. This map is used to analyze the fluid flow for different Reynolds numbers. Additionally, for any acoustic path between two transducers, the average fluid velocity is calculated using the obtained pixel values. Thus, a quality metric is developed in this paper. This metric calculates the ideal average fluid velocity ratio between the acoustic paths. The developed metric can be used to evaluate the quality of the ultrasonic flowmeter in the domain of turbulent flow.