Ultrasonic propagation analysis of a tomography clamp-on ultrasonic flowmeter

Abstract

Accurate flow rate measurements are required in many industrial plants. The flow rate for feedwater is one of the important parameters in many power plants. Therefore, evaluation of existing flowmeters is sometimes required. One of the effective solutions to measure the flow rates in existing pipes is to use clamp-on ultrasonic flowmeters that the ultrasonic sensors are installed at designated points external to the piping system. To improve the measurement accuracy, parallel multiple measuring lines have been generally employed for in line type ultrasonic flowmeters. However, it is difficult to set the sensors on parallel for the clamp-on type. Therefore, we focused on an ultrasonic tomography method that reconstructs the flow velocity distribution using multiple measurement lines. In the tomography method, ultrasonic is emitted with wide-divergence angle and the signal is received at several sensors. In this study, we analyzed the ultrasonic propagation in a 100A pipe to confirm the effectiveness of the tomographic flow measurement method.