Note: Ultrasonic gas flowmeter based on optimized time-of-flight algorithms

Abstract

A new digital signal processor based single path ultrasonic gas flowmeter is designed, constructed, and experimentally tested. To achieve high accuracy measurements, an optimized ultrasound driven method of incorporation of the amplitude modulation and the phase modulation of the transmit-receive technique is used to stimulate the transmitter. Based on the regularities among the received envelope zero-crossings, different received signal's signal-to-noise ratio situations are discriminated and optional time-of-flight algorithms are applied to take flow rate calculations. Experimental results from the dry calibration indicate that the designed flowmeter prototype can meet the zero-flow verification test requirements of the American Gas Association Report No. 9. Furthermore, the results derived from the flow calibration prove that the proposed flowmeter prototype can measure flow rate accurately in the practical experiments, and the nominal accuracies after FWME adjustment are lower than 0.8% throughout the calibration range.