Flowrate Measurement in a Pipe Using Kalman-Filtering Laminar Flowmeter

Abstract

A laminar flowmeter that estimates the unsteady flowrate in a pipe using a Kalman filter is proposed. The laminar flowmeter has 32 narrow pipes. Kalman filtering is applied to one of the narrow pipes to estimate its flowrate. Three pressure sensors are connected to the narrow pipe. Upstream and downstream pressure signals are applied to a model of pipeline dynamics. The midpoint pressure is calculated and compared with the measured value. The error signal is fed back to the model. According to the principle of the Kalman filter, the estimated flowrate converges to the real flowrate. The Kalman-filtering estimation is conducted in a real-time computing system. In this study, the steady flowrate in a pipe is estimated and calibrated with measured data. The proposed Kalman-filtering-based laminar flowmeter demonstrates very promising performance.