A Universal Calibration Device for an Air Flow Sensor of the VAV Terminal Unit

Abstract

In this paper, a new calibration device for an air flow sensor of the VAV terminal unit is designed. Multi-aperture air outlets are designed to meet the calibration requirements of the air flow sensor in a variety of measurement range. The device can calibrate the air flow sensors of different types of VAV terminal unit by a movable flow rectifier without repeating the design of a different calibration pipeline. The Raspberry PI is used to design the high-performance GUI interface and controlling algorithm to achieve a one-button intelligent calibration. The air flow sensors in three different types of VAV terminal units are used to calibrate the experiment. After testing, the differential pressure value measured by the air flow sensor can accurately measure the air flow within the accuracy of 5% after the formula conversion. The conversion from differential pressure values to air flow values requires precise calibration in order to establish an accurate air flow equation, and here the calibration device plays a key role. The negative effect caused by the distance between the flow rectifiers and the VAV terminal unit is discovered. In other words, the distance between the inlet flow rectifier and the air inlet of VAV terminal unit should be kept as close as possible, or within a range of 2~3 cm. Moreover, the distance between the air outlet of VAV terminal unit and the middle-flow rectifier should be kept as close as possible; otherwise, any slight gap will cause a huge error in the calibration result. The research contributes to the further study of airflow sensing technology through the conversion and calibration of differential pressure measurements to accurate air flow values.