A novel concept of measuring mass flow rates using flow induced stresses

Abstract

Measurement of mass flow rate is important for automatic control of the mass flow rate in many industries such as semiconductor manufacturing and chemical industry (for supply of catalyst to a reaction). In the present work, a new concept for direct measurement of mass flow rates which does not depend on the volumetric flow rate measurement and obviates the need for the knowledge of density is proposed from the measurement of the flow induced stresses in a substrate. The concept is formulated by establishing the relationship between the mass flow rate and the stress in the substrate. To this end, the flow field and the stress field in the substrate are evaluated simultaneously using a numerical procedure and the necessary correlations are derived. A least squares based procedure is used to derive the mass flow rate from the correlations as a function of the stress in the substrate.