Measurement of Flow Fluctuation in the Flow Standard Facility Based on Singular Value Decomposition

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Oct 15;21(20):6850. doi: 10.3390/s21206850.

Abstract

In order to accurately evaluate the flow stability of the flow standard facility, the flow fluctuation in the standard facility needs to be accurately measured. However, the flow fluctuation signal is always superimposed with the fluctuation signal of the measuring flowmeter or measurement system (mainly noise), which leads to inaccurate measurement of the flow fluctuation and even an unreliable evaluation result of the flow stability. In addition, when there are multiple fluctuation sources, flow fluctuations with different frequencies are superimposed together, which is extremely unfavorable for evaluating the impact of flow fluctuation with different single frequencies. In this paper, a new measuring method was proposed to obtain the fluctuation signal and the flow fluctuation based on singular value decomposition (SVD). Simulation experiments on the fluctuation signal (single frequency and multiple frequencies) under different levels of noise were conducted, and simulation results showed that the proposed method could accurately obtain the fluctuation signal and the flow fluctuation, even under high noise. Finally, an experimental platform was set-up based on a water flow standard facility and a flow fluctuation generator, and experiments on the output signal of a venturi flowmeter were carried out. The experiment results showed that the proposed method could effectively obtain the fluctuation signal and accurately measure the flow fluctuation.

Keywords: flow fluctuation; flow stability; flow standard facility; singular value decomposition.