Theoretical, Numerical, and Experimental Study on an Unsteady Venturi Flowmeter for Incompressible Flows

To examine the dynamic characteristics of turbomachinery and cavitation, the pulsating flow rates should be evaluated. As it is difficult to measure these pulsating flow rates quantitatively, systematic research has not been conducted on the dynamic characteristics of turbomachinery and cavitation. In this paper, an unsteady energy equation for a venturi tube has been proposed to measure pulsating flow rates. The pulsating flow rates were calculated using two methods based on the unsteady energy equation for incompressible flows. The first method calculated a pulsating flow rate by using the Euler method. The second one calculated the complex amplitude of a pulsating flow rate using a transfer function derived from the linearized unsteady energy equation. We analytically examined the order of magnitude for unsteady terms. The results indicated that the unknown unsteady loss was much smaller than the unsteady momentum. In the experiment, pulsating flows were generated by a reciprocating piston, and the given pulsating flow was measured using a hot wire anemometer. The pulsating flow rates evaluated by using the proposed methods were validated via numerical simulation and experiment. In particular, the influence of amplitudes on the evaluation of pulsating flow rates was numerically examined. Therefore, the nonlinear effect could be evaluated by using the proposed method, and the time-averaged loss coefficient was enough to evaluate the pulsating flow rate coefficient. The proposed unsteady venturi flowmeter can be applied to a wide range of research fields, such as analyzing dynamic characteristics of flows.