Structural optimization to improve the dynamic performance of turbine flowmeters

Abstract

It is of great significance to study the dynamic performance of flowmeters to improve their measurement accuracy in complex working conditions. The dynamic performance of the turbine flowmeter is studied by experiments and numerical simulations under step flow and pulsatile flow conditions. The results suggest that the mass and length of the impeller, the number of blades, the blade angle, and the tip radius of the impeller are the main factors affecting the dynamic performance of the turbine flowmeter. An optimized scheme is proposed based on the analysis results with the feasibility verified by CFD simulations and experiments. The results show that the dynamic performance of the turbine flowmeter is greatly improved after structural optimization. The step response time constant of the optimized model is reduced to 50 % of that of the original model, and the cutoff frequency of the amplitude-frequency characteristic is increased by 87.7 % under pulsatile flow conditions. The overall measurement errors for the pulsatile flow experiments are within 2 %.