Imperial College London
Alternate

DrFredericCegla

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Reader in Mechanical Engineering
 
 
 
//

Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 8096f.cegla

 
 
//

Location

 

567City and Guilds BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

//

Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Gu:2019:10.1109/TIM.2018.2834118,
author = {Gu, X and Cegla, F},
doi = {10.1109/TIM.2018.2834118},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement},
pages = {65--72},
title = {The effect of internal pipe wall roughness on the accuracy of clamp-on ultrasonic flow meters},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIM.2018.2834118},
volume = {68},
year = {2019}
}
Download

RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Clamp-on transit-time ultrasonic flowmeters (UFMs) suffer from poor accuracy compared with spool-piece UFMs due to uncertainties that result from the in-field installation process. One of the important sources of uncertainties is internal pipe wall roughness which affects the flow profile and also causes significant scattering of ultrasound. This paper purely focuses on the parametric study to quantify the uncertainties (related to internal pipe wall roughness) induced by scattering of ultrasound and it shows that these effects are large even without taking into account the associated flow disturbances. The flowmeter signals for a reference clamp-on flowmeter setup were simulated using 2-D finite element analysis including simplifying assumptions (to simulate the effect of flow) that were deemed appropriate. The validity of the simulations was indirectly verified by carrying out experiments with different separation distances between ultrasonic probes. The error predicted by the simulations and the experimentally observed errors were in good agreement. Then, this simulation method was applied on pipe walls with rough internal surfaces. For ultrasonic waves at 1 MHz, it was found that compared with smooth pipes, pipes with only a moderately rough internal surface (with 0.2-mm rms and 5-mm correlation length) can exhibit systematic errors of 2 in the flow velocity measurement. This demonstrates that pipe internal surface roughness is a very important factor that limits the accuracy of clamp on UFMs.
AU  - Gu,X
AU  - Cegla,F
DO  - 10.1109/TIM.2018.2834118
EP  - 72
PY  - 2019///
SN  - 0018-9456
SP  - 65
TI  - The effect of internal pipe wall roughness on the accuracy of clamp-on ultrasonic flow meters
T2  - IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIM.2018.2834118
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/59319
VL  - 68
ER  -
Download