NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF EFFECTS OF UPSTREAM DISTURBANCES ON ACCURACY OF VORTEX-SHEDDING FLOW METER
Pierre Cambier, S. Vandermarlière, Ernst von Lavante, U. Banaszak, H. Krisch, Sylvain Tournillon
Abstract:
In the present investigation, the problem of accurate determination of volumetric flows by means of the so-called vortex-shedding flow meter in the case of upstream disturbances caused by several versions of bends has been studied. To this end, the flow about the bluff body used in the presently studied vortex-shedding flow meter was investigated experimentally and numerically for the case of incompressible fluid flow (water). The disturbances considered presently were generated by a single 90-degree bend, in-plane double bend and a three-dimensional 90-degree out-of-plane double bend. Additionally, the distance of the bluff body from the disturbance source was varied. The computations were carried out for a limited number of cases using the three-dimensional unsteady incompressible solver of the Navier-Stokes equations as included in the Fluent commercial program. The effects of turbulence were modelled by using the realizable k-ε turbulence model. The resulting flow fields were analyzed using various methods, including visualization, evaluation of several of their global features and DFT of properly chosen variables. The numerical results were validated by comparisons of the simulated k-factor with the measured one. The effect of the disturbances was assessed by comparison with the undisturbed reference case. Depending on the configuration investigated and the distance of the meter from the bend outflow location, the change of the k-factor from the undisturbed reference case was noticeable. The difference of the simulated and measured deviations was in some cases less than 0.2 %.
Keywords:
vortex flow meters, flow simulation, experimental flow metering, accuracy, upstream disturbance
Download:
IMEKO-WC-2009-TC9-194.pdf
DOI:
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Event details
Event name:
XIX IMEKO World Congress
Title:

Fundamental and Applied Metrology

Place:
Lisbon, PORTUGAL
Time:
06 September 2009 - 11 September 2009
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