Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Jost Adam
Faculty of Engineering – The Mads Clausen Institute – SDU NanoSYD – SDU
Ultrasonic flow meters are used in a wide range of applications. This project specifically focuses on the particular problem of measuring flow in multi-phase flow condition, where the flow media consists of two or more substances. One industrially relevant example is the so-called bubbly flow scenario, where the flowing media is a gas/liquid mixture. In state-of-the art flow meters, this inhomogenity significantly affects the measuring accuracy, since ultrasonic signals get scattered from the second phase, adding distortions to the received signal. In practice, this leads to highly error-prone, unreliable measurement results. In this project in collaboration with Siemens Flow Instruments, we develop a numerical model that helps better understand and predict measurements in this screnario, with the ultimate goal of overcoming the described problem.
As it is nearly impossible to establish a measurement setup, where multiphase flow conditions would be sufficiently controlled to compare a single measurement to single simulation, we have to introduce a statistical modelling approach. Series of simulations hence need to performed for various phase distributions, flow speeds and flow profiles, in order to look for common received signal signatures. To this end, we implement our model in Matlab and run this vast number of necessary simulations in a highly parallel fashion on the ABACUS 2.0 supercomputer.
