Stable and fully developed gas flow field is crucial for realizing accurate measurement of gas ultrasonic flow meter. To reduce the flow field distortion, a flow conditioner is usually used. However, the traditional monotype flow conditioner can only improve the flow field distribution partly. The measurement accuracy of the transit time ultrasonic flow meter is still affected because of its serious flow field distortion in the complex pipeline conditions. In this paper, to further improve the flow field distribution, a combined conditioner is investigated. The combined flow conditioner is composed of fan-shaped section, turbulent mixing cavity, and honeycomb-shaped section. The effects of fan blade angle and cavity length on the flow field of the DN50 flow meter are studied using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Simulation results indicate that compared with the monotype conditioner, the combined conditioner has better performance on effectively reducing the swirl and turbulence and providing more stable and repetitive velocity profiles. Experiments also validate the effectiveness of the combined conditioner. The flow meter with the combined conditioner has better repeatability of less than 0.2%, which is better than those of the monotype conditioners under the same conditions. This work is very useful for accurate measurement of gas ultrasonic flow meter, especially for the complex pipeline conditions.
YUAN Yaqi1(袁亚琦)，LI Shiyangl*(李世阳)，ZHENG Jia1(郑佳),LI Mingrui2(李明睿)
. CFD-Aided Investigation of Combined Flow Conditioners for Gas Ultrasonic Flow Meter[J]. Journal of Shanghai Jiaotong University(Science), 2023
, 28(5)
: 611
-620
.
DOI: 10.1007/s12204-021-2378-1
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