Design of Flow Conditioner and Research on Evaluation of Flow Adjustment Effect

Abstract

Since ultrasonic flowmeter is sensitive to the flow field. Insufficient development of the flow field such as vortex and asymmetric flow will cause deviations in the measurement results. It has become a common method to accelerate the stabilization of irregular fluids to a fully developed state by a flow conditioner. The flow conditioner is a device installed upstream of the flowmeter to accelerate the stabilization of the irregular flow field, eliminate abnormal flow, and reduce the influence of swirling flow. In practical application, the correlation between flow conditioner and flow meter model has also become an important obstacle restricting the design, compatibility and popularization of flow conditioner. It is an exploratory and meaningful work to design a universal flow conditioner and propose a flow field optimization evaluation method and other basic theories and common key technologies of flow measurement. This paper introduces the self-designed universal flow conditioner, and focuses on the flow adjustment effect evaluation method based on CFD. In order to verify the adjustment effect of the combined flow conditioner, the simulated calculation is carried out and the flow field adjustment effect is compared with that of the plate-type flow conditioner.When the inlet flow rate is 20 m/s, the simulation results show that the combined flow conditioner has excellent performance in eliminating flow field distortion at about 15D downstream the flow conditioner, while the flow velocity distribution in the axial direction can also be optimized to a fully developed symmetrical state.