A non-invasive method for measuring liquid and gas flow rates through a pipeline wall

In connection to methods developed for determining “liquid-gas” volume-mass parameters, carried out at South Ural State University, this article presents a new method for measuring liquid and gas flow rates. The method makes it possible to measure a turbulent flow’s convective velocity through a pipeline wall and the volumetric flow rate of a liquid or gas. A brief description of Taylor's “frozen turbulence” hypothesis, which forms the basis of the method, is given, and the main problems associated with its proof in relation to the problem of determining the convection velocity of turbulence are identified. A mathematical signal processing method is presented based on two-dimensional frequency-wave number spectral processing and spatiotemporal signal filtering. A functional scheme and the input signal processing algorithm of the proposed device is presented. Mathematical modeling was performed in the ANSYS CFD computational fluid dynamics package using the hybrid eddy-resolving turbulence model SBES to determine the optimal configuration of the experimental setup. A brief description is given of the non-invasive sonar flow meter “K-Omega P1” prototype based on method presented and of numerical simulation results. Tests were performed on the METRAN-UPA-2000 flow test workbench which is a secondary standard. Full-scale test results on the flow test workbench for five flow rates are presented. Conclusions are drawn about the research results to date and further steps to improve the measurement method using the k-omega beamforming processing method.