Performance Differences of an Electromagnetic Flow Sensor With Nonideal Electrodes Based on Different-Dimensional Weight Functions

Abstract

In the strict sense, the electrodes of the electromagnetic flow sensor (EFS) are nonideal, and the selection of models with different dimensions can result in a relatively large difference in the calculation of the weight function, which further affects the estimation of the output signal. The aim of this paper is to explore the difference in the characteristics of the 2-D and 3-D EFSs with nonideal electrodes. In this paper, the analytical expressions of weight function for both 2-D and 3-D cases are deduced mathematically, and a general weight function methodology based on simulation data and fitting is presented to solve the mixed boundary problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the comparison with the numerical simulation. Meanwhile, the distributions of weight function for 3-D EFSs with different electrodes in cross sections are obtained by means of the method mentioned above, and the difference between the 2-D model and the 3-D model is revealed intuitively. Finally, the output characteristics of the EFS with different dimensions and electrode shapes are calculated by coupling the data of three fields, including the weight field, the flow field, and the magnetic field. Based on the comparison between the experimental data and the calculated values, the direct influence of the dimension and the electrode shape on the output characteristics of the EFS is discussed, and the theoretical analysis is made for the structure design and optimization of the EFS.