Design and simulation of multi-sensor insertion flowmeter adaptive to non-uniform velocity profiles

Flowrate is one of the significant parameters in energy and resource engineering. This paper presents a multi-sensor insertion flow measurement system and a flow measurement method that includes an integration procedure based on cubic B-spline interpolation. The flow field around measuring section at different straight pipe length in circular conduit was simulated by FLUENT software and a comparative analysis of three measurement methods was presented - (1)single-sensor measurement; (2)multi-sensor measurement based on arithmetic average method; (3)multi-sensor measurement based on cubic B-spline interpolation method. The result of the comparative analysis suggested that the multi-sensor measurement method based on cubic B-spline interpolation could be adaptive to non-uniform velocity profiles and considerably improve the measuring accuracy of fluid flowrate by means of insertion flowmeters for non-fully developed pipe flow.