Acoustic owmeter for the measurement of the mean ow velocity in pipes

Wan-Sup Cheung,a) Hyu-Sang Kwon, Kyung-Am Park, and Jong-Seung Paik

Mechanical Metrology Division, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science, P.O. Box 102, Yusong, Taejon 305-600, Republic of Korea

Received 5 June 2000; revised 25 July 2001; accepted 27 July 2001 This paper proposes a new technique for measuring the gas ow velocity averaged along the nite length of a pipe as well as over its cross-sectional area. Unlike the conventional gas owmeters, the proposed technique exploits the one-dimensional plane waves that propagate uniformly across the pipe cross-sectional area. When a uid ows along the pipe, the plane waves are superposed with the ow eld such that the positive-going and negative-going plane wave components undergo the change of their wave numbers. Such wave number variation due to the mean ow velocity has provided a major motivation for developing a new way of measuring the mean ow velocity in the pipe, which is referred to as the acoustic owmeter. To examine the feasibility of the developed ow velocity measurement method, including its theoretical backgrounds, experimental setups are illustrated in this paper. Detailed experimental data for the ow velocity range of 227 m/s reveal the linearity of the proposed acoustic owmeter and its salient environmental robustness for the different acoustic pressure patterns in the pipe and, furthermore, for different velocity proles over the pipe cross-section area. 2001 Acoustical Society of America. DOI: 10.1121/1.1404379 PACS numbers: 43.20.Ye, 43.28.We LCS

I. INTRODUCTION

The measurement technology of gas ow velocity in pipes has recently been an important issue in nationwide natural gas pipelines, intake and exhaust gas pipelines of automobiles, and ventilation ducts of large buildings. The gas ow measurement has been a prime factor in the state control of gas supply systems, for the production of quieter and more fuel-efcient engines and in the environmental noise reduction of large buildings. The ow measurement principle in these industrial applications is still based on the classical nozzle-type or hot-wire owmeters.1 Unlike these classical ow measurement methods, acoustical methods have attempted to use the principle of the pipe or duct acoustics2 to measure the gas ow velocity. Fundamentals behind these attempts are based on the use of the incident and reected plain waves in the pipe. Potzick et al.3 suggested the long wavelength acoustic owmeter that uses the two microphones installed in the pipe wall to measure the standing waves excited by two frequency components fundamental and second-harmonic components . The specic equal-amplitude conditions for the two microphones, which are obtained by choosing the two harmonic components of a sound source, were shown to give a way of measuring the ow velocity in the pipe. This method requires a delicate tracking and tuning technology of two harmonic sounds that should satisfy the equal amplitude conditions according to the ow velocity. The instrumentation for tracking and tuning two harmonic sounds presents much difculty in real implementation. Unlike this tracking and tuning methodology, Alves et al.4,5 suggested the use of the acoustical transfer function between paired microphones spaced a nite disa

Electronic mail: wansup@kirss.re.kr J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110 (5), Pt. 1, Nov. 2001

tance apart. The phase change of the transfer function, which depends on the ow velocity and its direction, was exploited to estimate the Mach number of owing uid in the pipe. Three different methods of estimating the phase change of the standing wave and related Mach number using the single, dual, and triple paired microphones were introduced recently. Feasibility studies on these methods are in progress, including experimental investigation to judge their effectiveness in real ow measurements. This work is also based on fundamental duct acoustics.2 Acoustic plane waves in the pipe present two excellent properties: the uniformly distributed propagation velocity normal to the cross-section area and the outstanding repeatability of the plane waves inside the pipe. The uniformly distributed sound propagation property leads to the measurement of the averaged ow velocity over the cross-sectional area. Furthermore, multiple velocities at multiple positions, locally measured within the nite length, enable us to obtain the mean velocity along the length of the pipe as well as over the pipe cross-section area. In fact, the acoustic plane waves in the pipe are always accompanied by the superposition of the incident plane wave coming from the acoustic source with the reected one from the outside of the straight pipe. This condition provides excellent repeatability of the acoustic plane wave inside the pipe. The effective speed of sound for the plane wave propagating in the same direction as uid ow is increased by the amount of the normal ow velocity. Similarly, the effective speed of sound for the plane wave propagating oppositely to the ow direction is decreased. Both changes of wave numbers corresponding to each plane wave can give an indirect measure of the averaged ow velocity along the nite length of the pipe as well as over the cross-sectional area. This understanding has already been investigated in experimental work.6 8 More improved mea 2001 Acoustical Society of America

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surement techniques of ow velocity in the pipe are proposed in Sec. II. In order to examine the proposed methods experimentally, a new measurement device developed in this work is also introduced in Sec. III. The experimental reconstruction of acoustic pressure eld in the measurement system is addressed in Sec. IV. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the success of this work and related discussions are also added in Sec. V. In Sec. VI, major contributions of this work are summarized and work in progress is discussed.

FIG. 1. Schematic setup of measuring the standing wave in the pipe.

B. Measurement method for the mean ow velocity in the pipe II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDS AND MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES

A general case of sound propagation in ducts2 may include the convective and scattering effects of the mean ow with refraction by velocity gradients and temperature gradients. But plane wave analysis is appropriate for many cases of sound propagation in ducts where the wavelength of interest is large compared to their transverse dimension. A good example is the uid conveying pipelines where ow measurements are needed.
A. Acoustic plane wave propagation in the pipes

From Eq. 1 , the periodic standing pressure pattern along the pipe is separated into the spatially dependent term P(x) and the time-dependent P(t). Thus, the positiondependent acoustic pressure P(x) in the pipe at any instant is considered separately. Figure 1 shows the schematic view of measuring the acoustic pressures of the standing wave pattern using multiple microphones installed on the pipe wall. When each microphone is equally spaced by a gap , the acoustic pressures at three neighboring positions satisfy the following relations: Pn 1 Pn Pn 1 e
jk n 1 jk n n 1

e jk e jk e jk

n 1 n n 1

When an acoustic wave, whose wavelength is quite large compared to the inner diameter D of the pipe i.e., typically 2D as recommended in ISO 10534-1 ,9 is generated in the pipe, it becomes a plane wave whose acoustic pressure distribution is very nearly uniform10 over the cross section after it is propagated more than a wavelength from the source. When the mean ow velocity eld is superposed with the acoustic eld in the pipe, the resultant acoustic pressure is described as P x,t P x P t P0 e
jk x

e e
jk

P0 , P0 3

n 1,2,3,...,N 2 .

P 0 e jk

e i t.

In Eq. 3 , P n denotes the acoustic pressure at position x n . By solving the incident and reected waves P 0 , P 0 at x 0 from the rst two acoustic pressures P n 1 , P n and then substituting the incident and reected waves into the third pressure P n 1 , a spatial recursive from along the longitudinal position is obtained as Pn
1e jk

P 0 and P 0 are the acoustic pressures of positively and negatively propagating wave components at position x 0. denotes the angular velocity of sound 2 f , f the excitation frequency of an acoustic source and k and k are the complex wave numbers corresponding to the positively and negatively propagating plane waves. The complex wave numbers are dened as k 1 ja k 0 / 1 M , k 1 ja k 0 / 1 M , 2 where M is the Mach number (M U/C), the acoustic pressure attenuation constant,2 and k 0 denotes the wave number of the stationary uid (U 0). In this work, the attenuation constant is ignored because is close to 0.0014 in air ( f 500 Hz, D 0.1 m, C 343.3 m/s . When the uid in the pipe ows in the positive x direction, Eq. 2 indicates that the wave number of the positively propagating plane wave component decreases but that of the negatively propagating one oppositely increases. It means that the change in wave number for both plane wave components due to the ow velocity can be obtained quantitatively from the variation of the pressure pattern along the pipe. It has been a key idea in developing a new method to measure the mean ow velocity.
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Pn

1e

jk

Pn 1 e j

This spatial recursive form will be shown to play a central role in estimating the ow velocity in this paper. The range of Mach number considered in this work is equal to or less than 0.1 mean air ow velocity U 34.3 m/s . Consequently, the positive and negative wave k 0 (1 M M 2 M 3 ) and numbers are approximated as k 2 3 k k 0 (1 M M M ) by neglecting the fourth- and higher-order terms of the Mach number. Similarly, the phase angle of the right-hand side of Eq. 4 is also approximated as (k k ) 2k 0 (1 M 2 ). By substituting these approximations into the spatial recursive equation 4 and then arranging them, the spatial recursive relation is rewritten as Pn
1e j M M 3 k0

Pn

1e

j M

M 3 k0

2 cos 1

M 2 k0

Pn .

This presents a clear graphical understanding about the estimation of the Mach number using the three consecutive acoustic pressures P n 1 , P n , P n 1 . Let the Mach numberdependent rotation angle be (M ) k 0 (M M 3 ). Then, the sum of the (n 1)th acoustic pressure P n 1 rotated negatively by (M ) and the (n 1)th acoustic pressure
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FIG. 2. Phase vector diagram of the spatial recursive form for three neighboring pressures.

P n 1 rotated positively by (M ) is found to be equal to the nth acoustic pressure multiplied by 2 cos((1 M 2)k0 ). Figure 2 illustrates this relation graphically. It shows that the Mach number is related to the amount of phase shift for the neighboring phase vectors P n 1 and P n 1 with respect to the midposition phase vector P n . As the Mach number increases, the amount of the phase shift gets larger. Of course, the direction of the ow velocity is shown to determine the direction of the phase shift for the neighboring phase vectors by checking whether its direction is clockwise or counter clockwise. The rate of the phase shift is proportional to the gain factor k 0 . This means that one can adequately choose the gain factor by varying either the excitation frequency of an acoustic source (k 0 2 f /C) or the gap between the neighboring microphones. As a result, the sensitivity of the phase shift for the given Mach number can be suitably tuned in a real experiment.
C. Estimation of ow velocity

FIG. 3. Picture of experimental setup.

side by y. Then, the best-tted coefcient vector x is always obtained from the following normal equation: CM SM AH A AH y, 7

where the superscript H denotes the Hermitian operator and the pseudoinverse.11 In this work, the singular value decomposition method presented in MATLAB12 is used to obtain the pseudoinverse. Given the best-tted coefcient vector x C M ,S M T , the Mach number is calculated from M3 M 1 k0 tan
1

This section presents a way of estimating the best-tted Mach number for multiple acoustic pressure measurement data along the pipe. As shown in Eq. 5 and Fig. 2, the Mach number-dependent rotation angle is described as (M ) k 0 (M M 3 ). Let the angle-related cosine and sine components be C M A M cos(k0 (M M 3)) and SM A M sin(k0 (M M 3)) where a scale factor A M 0.5/cos(k0 (1 M 2)) from Eq. 5 . From the set of N measurements P n ,n 0,1,2,...,N 1 , we obtain N 2 spatial recursive forms between three neighboring data, which are described as P2 P0 P3 P1 PN
1

SM . CM

j P0 P2 j P1 P3 CM SM PN

PN

j PN

P1 P2 . PN 2 6

This third-order cubic equation gives a single real-valued Mach number that is readily calculated from the algebraic solution.13 This real-valued solution is used in this work but two complex-valued ones are not considered because they do not have physical interpretation. It is obvious that the mean ow velocity obtained from the above-given estimation procedures is the best-tted value for the locally measured acoustic pressure data that are collected over the pipe length between the rst and nal microphones. It should be noted from Eq. 8 that the ratio of the cosine component C M to the sine component S M enables the Mach number estimation without any knowledge of the Mach number-dependent scale factor A M 0.5/cos(k0 (1 M 2)).

III. MEASUREMENT SETUPS

For the case of N 4, the best tted coefcient vector x C M ,S M T is readily obtained using the well-known leastsquares method. Let the (N 2)-by-2 matrix at the left-hand side of Eq. 6 be A and the column vector at the left-hand
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In order to examine experimentally the mean ow velocity measurement method introduced in Sec. II, experimental setups in Fig. 3 were built up. They consisted of two ow velocity measurement setups using the nozzle-type reference owmeter and the acoustic owmeter developed in this work.
Cheung et al.: Acoustic owmeter for mean ow velocity in pipes

nel microphone power supply LarsonDavis model 2210 was used to operate the seven-channel microphones and their preampliers. The seven-channel acoustic pressure signals were simultaneously converted into a digital time series by using the HP-VXI data acquisition system dual HP E8402 As that simultaneously converts all analog signals into 16 bit digital codes and records them digitally into the PC hard drive.

IV. RECONSTRUCTION OF PHASE VECTORS

FIG. 4. Schematic conguration of measuring instruments.

A. Measurement setup of reference owmeter

The schematic drawing of the experimental setups is shown in Fig. 4. In order to suck air into the pipeline, a blower was used. The ow rate of Mach number M 0.1 was controlled with a main buttery valve and a bypass valve installed at the end of the downstream pipe. The reference nozzles were used to measure the mean air ow velocity in the test line of pipe diameter 100 mm. Three nozzles throat diameter 23.4, 35.1, and 52.6 mm with a differential pressure gauge were calibrated in the gas ow standard system of the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science KRISS . The calibrated uncertainty of mean velocity measurement for the three nozzles was found to be less than 0.43% with a condence level of 95%. The upstream straight length of a nozzle is 20 times the pipe diameter, which is enough upstream length for fully developed ow at a nozzle. To measure the mean air ow velocity, the upstream pressure was measured using a U-type manometer and the differential pressure of the nozzle was also measured using the pressure gauge Rosemount Measurement Modal 1151 . The output of the pressure gauge was read each half second through the digital multimeter HP 34401A that is interfaced to a PC using the HPIB interface.
B. Measurement setup of acoustic owmeter

This section presents a way of estimating the phase vector of acoustic pressure at each acoustic pressure measurement position from the acoustic pressure signals sampled in the time domain. Let p m (x n ,k t); n 0,1,...,N 1 and k 0,1,2,... be the set of digitally sampled acoustic pressure signals in time domain t sampling time, N number of microphones, position x n n . Given the single frequency f of the acoustic source, it is quite straightforward to estimate the phase vectors at the measurement positions by calculating the discrete Fourier series of the sampled pressure data, as follows: Cn C xn , f 2 K0 2 K0
K0 1 k 0

p m x n ,k t cos 2 f k t , 9 p m x n ,k t sin 2 f k t ,

K0 1 k 0

Sn S xn , f

where K 0 is the record length. The cosine and sine coefcients C n , S n ; n 0,...,N 1 enable us to reconstruct the complex-valued phase vector P n at position x n n , which is given as P n P real x n j P imag x n Cn jS n . 10

The instruments shown in Fig. 4 were used to measure the ow velocity using the acoustic wave. The temperature sensor was used to calculate the speed of sound owing in the pipe. The horn-type acoustic source that generates sound in the pipe was installed at the upstream part of the ow measurement section whose inner diameter is 0.1 m. In order to generate a pure tone sound in the pipe, the signal generator HP 33120A with a phase lock/TCXO time base was chosen, which is interfaced to the PC using the HPIB interface. Its output is connected to the power amplier B&K 2706 that provides an adequate current level for the horn driver unit. A microphone array, which consists of seven eq1 uispaced 4 in. microphones GRAS 2633 and their preampliers GRAS 26AC , was also xed just on the inner wall of the measurement section. The gap between two microphones was chosen to be 0.1 m ( 0.1 m). The multichanJ. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 110, No. 5, Pt. 1, Nov. 2001

Specically, we chose an equiangle sampling technique, i.e., 512 samples per ten periods 51.2 samples per period . This integer number of samples per ten periods was experimentally found to enable more accurate estimation of the phase vector than other sample sets of noninteger periods. Multiple periods of sampled records were intentionally chosen to reduce both higher- and subharmonic components as much as possible in reconstructing the phase vectors corresponding to the single tone acoustic source. The set of reconstructed multiple phase vectors P n ; n 0,1,2,...,6 are used to estimate the best-tted mean ow velocity according to the procedures described in Eqs. 6 8 .

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

To achieve accurate measurement of the phase vectors along the pipe, the calibration procedure of multiple microphones is introduced and calibration results are illustrated. The ow velocity obtained by the proposed acoustic ow meter is compared to that measured by the nozzle-type reference owmeter. Experimental results carried out to examine the performance of the acoustic owmeter for different ow conditions are also presented in the following.
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TABLE I. Comparison of relative magnitude errors between the measured and reconstructed acoustic phase vectors for three different ow control valve conditions closed, half-open, fully open . Microphones Channel Channel Channel Channel Channel Channel Channel 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 Fully open 0.18% 0.08% 0.05% 0.05% 0.10% 0.12% 0.13% 0.13% Half-open 0.24% 0.12% 0.14% 0.07% 0.23% 0.09% 0.19% 0.18% Closed 0.23% 0.16% 0.09% 0.09% 0.23% 0.14% 0.22% 0.19%

Standard deviation

among them. This measurement accuracy level had been maintained throughout in this work.
FIG. 5. Spatial acoustic pressure distribution of the standing wave for a 500-Hz pure tone acoustic source.

B. Measurement results of mean ow velocity

A. Calibration of microphone array

When multiple microphones, specically as in this study, are used to reconstruct the standing wave pattern using the phase vectors, nely calibrated responses of the magnitude and phase for each microphone are required.7,8 The rst microphone at the origin (x 0) was calibrated at 500 Hz by comparing the primary standard microphone in KRISS. The comparative calibration of other microphones with respect to the rst microphone calibrated was carried out using the sound intensity calibrator B&K 3541 acoustic coupler UA 0914 whose paired ports 1 and 2 provide the equal sound pressure with two microphones. The relative magnitude and phase responses H c,n ( f ); n 1,2,...,6 of the six channels were measured according to ISO 10534-2.14 The measured magnitude and phase responses were used to compensate the relative magnitude and phase responses using the correction method for paired microphones suggested in ISO 10534-2. Figure 5 illustrates the reconstructed standing wave pattern for nonzero velocity, whose acoustic pressure levels and phases are compensated by the calibration responses. The symbol denotes the measured phase vectors and the solid line does the reconstructed phase vector using the least squared-based standing wave reconstruction method.15 The percentage error in Fig. 5 was calculated by normalizing the difference between the measured and reconstructed phase vectors by the root-mean-squared acoustic pressure over the one wavelength. It was shown that the maximum error between the measured acoustic pressures and the best-tted model was about 0.2% for the magnitude and about 0.05 for the phase difference, respectively. This error analysis of acoustic pressure measurements, shown in Fig. 5, was made to check each measurement set of seven phase vectors. Table I illustrates the relative magnitude errors for three different ow control-valve conditions closed state U 12.7 m/s, half-open state U 8.6 m/s, fully open state U 4.4 m/s . It shows that the standard deviation of the relative magnitude errors was less than 0.24% even for the ow control-valve closed, i.e., the fastest velocity condition
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In this experiment, a 500-Hz pure tone was chosen and its sound level, averaged along the pipe, was 20 dB higher than the acoustic ow noise level. This sound source level was experimentally chosen to obtain the phase vectors with the measurement errors bounded within the range of 0.2%, as noted previously. Furthermore, the steady state of uid ow in the pipe was also maintained as recommended in ISO/CD 5167,16 the ratio of the root-mean-squared value of uctuating pressure component P rms to the time-mean value of the differential pressure P mean was kept at less than 4% ( P rms/ P mean 0.04). Each set of the phase vectors along the pipe, as noted in Sec. IV, was acquired every ten-period interval of the 500 Hz acoustic source such that 50 sets of the measured phase vectors per second were obtained and used to estimate their corresponding ow velocities. This reading rate of ow velocity is very fast in comparison to the reading rate of one to two samples per second typically used in gas ow velocity measurements. To synchronize with the reading rate of the reference owmeter, 25 consecutive velocity measurements 1 of the acoustic owmeter for 2 s were averaged to give one sample of its ow velocity. In Fig. 6, the measured ow velocities from the acoustic owmeter are compared against those measured with the reference owmeter for 28 different velocity measurement points in the ow velocity range of 2.526 m/s. Ten sampled data at each measurement condition were overlapped in Fig. 6. The standard deviation of velocity errors between the measurements of the acoustic owmeter and the reference owmeter was observed to be 0.096 m/s. These results may indicate that the linearity of the acoustic owmeter proposed in this paper is very acceptable to real applications. The linearity is shown to be more accurate than those of previous models by Potzick et al.3 and Alves.4,5 The encouraging results presented previously lead to further experimental attempts to examine what amount of measurement accuracy the developed method can present for different environmental conditions; more specically, for different acoustic pressure patterns along the measurement positions and different ow velocity proles over the pipe cross-sectional area. Different acoustic pressure distributions
Cheung et al.: Acoustic owmeter for mean ow velocity in pipes

FIG. 6. Comparison of the measured velocities from the acoustic owmeter y axis against those measured from the reference owmeter x axis .

along the pipe were made either by connecting two straight pipes of different length 0.4, 0.5 m to the intake part or removing three straight pipes 0.4, 0.5, 0.5 m from the intake part. These changes at the intake part make spatial shift of the acoustic pressure pattern along the pipe. Their spatial shift is related to the ratio of the half wavelength to the pipe length added to, or removed from, the intake part. These spatially shifted acoustic pressure patterns at the microphones were exploited to examine their effects on the mean ow velocity measurement. Figure 7 a shows the experimental results obtained from six different acoustic pressure patterns in the ow measurement section. Ten samples are plotted at each velocity position. The relative measurement errors, i.e., the difference between both owmeters normalized by the reference one, are less than 2% in the velocity range of U 7 m/s. The percentage error in the low velocity range of U 5 m/s is larger, i.e., 3%5%. The measurement results even for different acoustic pressure distributions show a small variation with the standard deviation of 0.112 m/s. Those variations may indicate the measurement resolution of the developed owmeter. The mean value for different acoustic pressure patterns show a curved bias from the zero in the velocity range of U 20 m/s. This biased feature is regarded as one of the systematic errors for the developed owmeter. An experimental approach to reduce the velocity bias from zero velocity is in progress. A fundamental issue in owmeters1 has been to achieve an averaged ow velocity over the pipe cross-section area. At the onset of this work, it became apparent that a salient property of the plane wave in the pipe, which is propagated uniformly over the pipe cross-section area with the speed of sound, could be exploited to develop a gas owmeter expected to be robust in measuring the averaged velocity over the cross-section area. To examine the robustness of the developed acoustic owmeter, experimental attempts were carried out. In this work, four kinds of pipe elementsa gate valve denoted by elbow-1 in Fig. 7 b , a single elbow denoted by elbow-1 in Fig. 7 b , closely coupled U-shaped double elbows in plane denoted by elbow-2 in
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 110, No. 5, Pt. 1, Nov. 2001

FIG. 7. Relative ow velocity errors between the nozzle-type reference owmeter and the developed acoustic owmeter measured from different experimental conditions: a for different acoustic pressure patterns inner diameter D 100 mm ; b for different ow velocity proles.

Fig. 7 b , and closely coupled double elbows out of plane denoted by elbow-3 in Fig. 7 b were chosen to generate different velocity proles unlike that of the straight pipe. The ow velocity measurement results for ve different velocity proles are shown in Fig. 7 b . The relative measurement errors are seen to be less than 2% in the velocity range of U 7 m/s regardless of different velocity proles. Even in the low ow velocity range of U 5 m/s, the relative measurement errors decrease in comparison to Fig. 7 a . It seems to be a big advantage for the acoustic owmeter that exploits the uniformly distributed acoustic plane wave over the pipe across-sectional area to measure the mean ow velocity. The measurements for different velocity proles are seen to yield
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less variation within a nite range than Fig. 7 b , whose standard deviation is equal to 0.101 m/s. It may also be related to the measurement resolution of the developed owmeter. Still, the mean values for each velocity measurement point reveal a curved bias from the zero in the range of ow velocity U 12 m/s, similar to the results shown in Fig. 7 a . To understand and solve this bias feature, further experimental work is also in progress.
VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was partially supported by the Korea Ministry of Science and Technology and the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science Project Code Nos. 99-0407-100 and 00-0406-031 . The authors would like to acknowledge kind comments and appropriate suggestions made by Professor L.C. Sutherland.
R. W. Miller, Flow Measurement Engineering Handbook McGrawHill, New York, 1983 . 2 Noise and Vibration: P.O.A.L. Davis, Chapter 12. Fundamental Duct Acoustics, edited by R. G. White and J. G. Walker Horwood, London, 1982 . 3 J. E. Potzick and B. Robertson, Long wavelength acoustic owmeter, U.S. Patent 4,445,389 1984 . 4 P. S. Alves and A. G. Doige, Measurement of mean gas ow velocity in piping using acoustic properties, Noise-con 88, West Lafayette, IN, 1988, pp. 469 474. 5 P. S. Alves, Three acoustic ow measurement methods, Fourth International Symposium on Fluid Flow Measurement, Denver, CO, 1999. 6 Y.-D. Chun, Y.-H. Kim, and W.-S. Cheung, The measurements of acoustic eld and mean ow velocity in pipes using microphone array, J. KSME 22, 17611768 1998 . 7 W.-S. Cheung and J.-S. Paik, A new acoustic owmeter measuring the mean pipe ow velocity, in Ref. 5. 8 W.-S. Cheung et al., Development of the mean uid velocity measurement technique using the sound eld reconstruction, KRISS Report No. KRISS-IR-2000-015, 2000. 9 ISO 10534-1, AcousticsDetermination of Sound Absorption Coefcient and Impedance in Impedance Tubes. 1. Method Using Standing Wave Ratio International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland, 1996 . 10 L. L. Beranek, Acoustics, 2nd ed. The Acoustical Society of America, 1986 . 11 G. Strang, Linear Algebra and its Applications, 3rd ed. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988 . 12 The Math Works, Inc, MATLAB Reference Guide Ver. 5.3 , 1999. 13 M. R. Spiegel, Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables, Schaums Outline Series McGrawHill, New York, 1968 . 14 ISO 10534-2, AcousticsDetermination of Sound Absorption Coefcient and Impedance in Impedance Tube. 2. Transfer Function Method International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, 1998 . 15 W.-S. Cheung, M.-J. Jho, and Y.-H. Kim, Improved method for the measurement of acoustic properties of a sound absorbent sample in the standing wave tube, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 27332739 1995 . 16 ISO/CD 5167-1, Measurement of Fluid Flow by Means of Pressure Differential Devices Inserted in Circular Cross-section Conduits Running Full. 1. General International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland, 1999 .
1

This paper has presented the theoretical background and experimental verication for a new technique for the measurement of the ow velocity averaged along the nite length of the pipe as well as over the cross section. Experimental data demonstrate the linearity of the proposed acoustic owmeter in the ow velocity range of up to 27 m/s. Its salient robustness was demonstrated under the different acoustic pressure patterns and different ow velocity proles over the pipe cross-sectional area. The results have encouraged this research team to further rene the proposed technique to develop a prototype for practical applications. Such renement will include the minimization of the measurement bias from zero at the low ow velocity and the experimental verication of the proposed method for the different frequencies of the acoustic source. The use of the multiple equispaced microphones in this work has enabled the measurement of the mean ow velocity in the pipe. The phase vectors of acoustic pressure along the pipe are also shown to provide the incident and reected acoustic pressures that lead to the direct calculation of reection coefcient, acoustic impedance, and acoustic absorption coefcients as in ISO 10534. Therefore, the measured ow velocity and the incident and reected acoustic pressure components in the pipe are expected to provide a way of evaluating the acoustic performances of mufers under real ow conditions by using only the multiple microphones. Since this method does not distort any acoustic eld, it may be more preferable than the nozzle-type gas owmeter whose installation in the pipe changes the acoustic property itself. Related experimental setups to examine such an advantage are under construction.

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Cheung et al.: Acoustic owmeter for mean ow velocity in pipes