Measurement-integrated simulation of wall pressure measurements using a turbulent model for analyzing oscillating orifice flow in a circular pipe

Abstract

The development of a highly functionalized orifice flowmeter with high accuracy under realistic conditions is desired. This paper presents a method for analyzing oscillating air flow through an orifice in a circular pipe. A measurement-integrated (MI) simulation using a standard k– ε model was used to reduce the computation time. In a previous study, the feedback law of the MI simulation was determined by considering the effect of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) grid on contracted flow. However, the previous method required the measurement of inlet flow rate, which is not feasible in many applications. Therefore, an MI simulation was proposed that only requires wall pressures, which are much simpler to measure than flow rate. In this MI simulation, the wall pressure downstream of an orifice was measured, and a new proportional–integral controller feedback algorithm was developed to control the inlet flow rate in the computed flow field. The proposed MI simulations were performed for steady and oscillatory flow rates up to 10 Hz. It was found that this MI simulation provides accurate solutions at a significantly shorter computation time than conventional CFD analysis.