Ultrasonic flow measurement by tracking streamlines in pipes

This article presents, an innovative evaluation method to measure the flow of a multi-phase fluid on the principle of particle echoes. The described method uses a correlative approach to determine particle positions based on frequency-coded signals. Generally, those signals reveal an orthogonal property to each other and an optimal autocorrelation with itself. In the case of more than one coded pulse sequences, the allocation between transmitted signals and received echoes is guaranteed. Due to the transit time shift of the echoes and its resulting particle positions, an object tracking method is described on the basis of a Kalman and a PDA filter. The object tracking method is used to determine and visualize the course of streamlines and its velocity. By verifying this method on a flow-analysis test bench, it could be demonstrated that a stable tracking of particles is possible; even if the turbulence of the flow increases.