Abstract
Recently, necessity of energy saving is more increasing in the industrial field with relation to energy cost increase. Measurement of steam flow rate is indispensable for an energy solution in facilities such as factories and power plants. However, a sensor installation for steam flow is generally difficult. Because steam pipes are necessary to be cut for the installation and the facilities needs to be out of operation temporarily. Accordingly, clamp-on type steam flowmeter is hoped to be developed. Therefore, we devised “heater method” for steam flow measurement. A circumferential heater is attached to the outside of a tube. Then, axial temperature distribution on the tube outside is measured. Steam velocity is analyzed on the basis of the temperature distribution, considering heat transmission in the pipe and thermal conductivity in steel pipe. We demonstrated that measurement value by the heater method fully agreed with reference value under the condition of steady flow in our previous paper (1) . However, it takes a long time to analyze steam velocity because the analysis was manually executed after inputting measured temperature data. Therefore, we developed on-line measurement system by the heater method and we conducted measurement for unsteady flow using this system. Then, the system performance such as measurement response is discussed.
