CFD Analysis of Reversed Installation on Flow Measurements by a Plate Orifice

Abstract

The accidental reversal installation of an orifice plate could occur during maintenance operations and a long time may have elapsed before being noticed. The reversal installation can result in a significant mismeasurement of flow in a pipe. In the paper, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model has been developed to simulate the pressure and velocity distribution in a pipe with the correct and the reversed installation of an orifice plate. The results shown that there is a significant difference between the correct and reversed installation in terms of pressure. Using the CFD pressure drop results for flows in both installations, an estimate correlation between those installations was found. This result provides the method to solve the issue about the accidental reversal of an orifice plate using a correction factor.