Design and Implementation of an Ultrasonic Flowmeter Based on the Cross-Correlation Method

Abstract

Ultrasonic flowmeters play an important role in industrial production, aerospace and other fields. In this paper, a high-precision ultrasonic flowmeter based on the cross-correlation method is designed, and the commercial finite element software COMSOL Multiphysics 5.6 is used to simulate the propagation process of ultrasonic waves during flow measurement, and the implementation process of the cross-correlation algorithm is simulated by Python language. The flowmeter adopts the cross-correlation algorithm to improve the measurement accuracy of ultrasonic time of flight and adopts the method of combining FPGA and an embedded microprocessor to improve operation efficiency. In order to verify the performance of the flowmeter, we tested the flowmeter on the National Institute of Metrology and the self-built test platform, using the still water dragging method, the dynamic volume method and the field comparison method, respectively. The results show that the flowmeter has the ability to test the flow under the condition of high flow velocity (26 m/s) and a pipe diameter in the range of DN6~DN1600, that the absolute value of the relative indication error does not exceed 0.815% and that the repeatability does not exceed 0.150%. The designed ultrasonic flowmeter has high measurement accuracy, good repeatability, strong stability and a wide application range.