Prediction on Meter Factor of the Turbine Flowmeter With Unsteady Numerical Simulation

The turbine flow meter is widely used in the flow rate measuring for its high accuracy and good repeatability. The flow rate will be calculated based on its meter factor, which is the most important factor of the turbine flow meter. The meter factor means pulses or revolution of the impeller per unit volume, and it can only be got from the calibration experiment. At the given flow rate, the driving torque on the impeller is equal to the drag torque, as many paper have pointed out. Based on the torque balancing equations, unsteady numerical simulation is carried out with RNG turbulence model and UDFs (User Defined Functions) in Fluent Code. The meter factor under different flow rate is calculated with the unsteady simulation. The prediction results based on the numerical simulation showed the same trends as the calibration experiment. At the most flow rate, the meter factor keeps constant, but at the lower flow rate, the meter factor higher than the constant. Because of neglecting the bearing friction drag in the process, the meter factor by numerical simulation is larger than experiment.