摘要

This paper proposes a non-intrusive and non-invasive method for measuring the gas flow rate in pneumatic industry. A heater unit is fixed on the partial circumference of the external wall of a pipeline and emits specific thermal pulses in a predetermined mode. Two sensors attached to the external wall detect the upstream temperature, and the gas flow can be measured according to the relationship between the flow rate and the dynamic thermal characteristics of the pipeline. To determine the preferable relationship, the temperature field model of the measurement system is built. Then, based on the measurement modes and the corresponding simulations, the objective functions for the gas flow specified on different dynamic thermal characteristics are established. Additionally, the minimum measurement time of the method, named reference time scale, is proposed. Further, robustness tests of the measurement method are derived by considering the influences of multiple factors on the objective functions. The experiments confirm that this method does not need to open the pipeline and disturb the flow regime in order to obtain the data; this method also avoids the typical time-consuming and complex operations, resists ambient temperature disturbance and achieves approximately acceptable results.