Physics Constrained High-Precision Data-Driven Modeling for Multi-Path Ultrasonic Flow Meter in Natural Gas Measurement

Abstract

Ultrasonic flow meters are crucial measuring instruments in natural gas transportation pipeline scenarios. The collected flow velocity data, along with the operational conditions data, are vital for the analysis of the metering performance of ultrasonic flow meters and analysis of the flow process. In practical applications, high requirements are placed on the modeling accuracy of ultrasonic flow meters. In response, this paper proposes an ultrasonic flow meter modeling method based on a combination of data learning and industrial physics knowledge. This paper builds ultrasonic flow meter flow velocity prediction models under different working conditions, combining pipeline flow field velocity distribution knowledge for data preprocessing and loss function design. By making full use of the characteristics of the physics and data learning, the prediction results are close to the real acoustic path flow velocity distribution; thus, the model has high accuracy and interpretability. Experiments are conducted to prove that the prediction error of the proposed method can be controlled within 1%, which can meet the needs of ultrasonic flow meter modeling and subsequent performance analysis in actual production.