Investigation of Influence of Area of Electrodes on the Characteristics of Electrode Polarization-Based Flow Sensor

Abstract

The electrode polarization-based flow meter is a simple and cost-effective flow meter, which utilizes the effect of flow of fluid on the polarization impedance that exists between the two electrodes for the measurement of flow rate of conductive fluid. It consists of two pairs of electrodes which are placed diametrically opposite to each other. Among these four electrodes, two diagonally placed electrodes are driven electrodes and other two diagonally placed electrodes serve as an output pickup. The output of polarization impedance-based flow metergets influence of excitation frequency, current density, ions constituents, conductivity of electrolyte solution, and temperature and area of electrodes. In this paper, we have analyzed and investigated the influence of electrodes area on the characteristics of electrode polarization-based flow meter. The experiment has been performed after the theoretical investigation and its results are reported in this paper. The performance of the flow meter is investigated by finite element method (FEM) usingComsol 5.4 Multiphysics simulation software. The simulation result shows that the variation in output of flow sensor with respect to the variation of diameter. The experiment results match quite well with simulations. It has been also observed that the result derived from the experiment exactly follows the theoretically derived equations.