Flow Rate Measurement in a High-temperature, Radioactive, and Corrosive Environment

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-17-2011

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement

Volume

60

Issue

6

First page number:

2062

Last page number:

2069

Abstract

The transit time of a thermal signal traveling along with a liquid flow can be obtained using a cross-correlation method. This transit-time-based flowmeter using thermocouples with grounded stainless steel shielding is by far the most robust and reliable solution to measure the flow rate in a harsh environment of high temperature, irradiation, and corrosion, typically seen in a nuclear reactor. In practice, cross-correlation calculation tends to produce flat peak plateau or multiple peaks, leading to a significant error in peak detection. To overcome this problem, in this paper, an autoadaptive impulse response function (AAIRF) estimation technique is thus introduced, and a significantly narrower peak is shown theoretically and also verified experimentally. In addition, we show that more accurate results can be obtained if a moving-average-filter-based cross-correlation function is combined with AAIRF. In this paper, we also investigate a few important practical problems related to negative delays and sampling frequencies of the data acquisition.

Keywords

Bandwidth; Correlation; Delay; Delay effects; Estimation; Temperature measurement; Temperature sensors

Disciplines

Controls and Control Theory | Electrical and Computer Engineering | Electrical and Electronics | Electronic Devices and Semiconductor Manufacturing | Energy Systems | Heat Transfer, Combustion | Mechanical Engineering | Power and Energy

Language

English

Permissions

Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the item. Publisher policy does not allow archiving the final published version. If a post-print (author's peer-reviewed manuscript) is allowed and available, or publisher policy changes, the item will be deposited.

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