Numerical Analysis of Transducer Installation Effect on Ultrasonic Gas Flow Meter

As for ultrasonic gas flow meters, special attention should be paid to transducer installation effect as the flow disturbed by transducers will greatly affect the transit time determination and accordingly reduce metering accuracy. This paper presents a numerical method to analyze the disturbed effects based on Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD), which can give valuable guides for transducer installations. Different pipe configurations covering a wide velocity range are modelled to simulate the actual flow field in different chords for three transducer installations including protrusion, recess and half protrusion. Then, detailed results are presented and the mechanism is analyzed to give suggestions about better transducer installations and a modified weighting factor method to improve the incredible error is also given in this paper.