Sensors, Vol. 16, Pages 1008: An Enhanced Technique for Ultrasonic Flow Metering Featuring Very Low Jitter and Offset (Sensors)

This paper proposes a new, improved method for water flow metering. It applies to a transit time ultrasonic flow meter device. In principle, the flow of a given liquid in a pipe is obtained by measuring the transit times of an ultrasonic wave in the upstream and downstream directions. The difference between these times is, in theory, linearly proportional to the liquid flow velocity. However, the fainter the flow is, the smaller the transit time difference (TTD) is. This difference can be as low as a few picoseconds, which gives rise to many technical difficulties in measuring such a small time difference with a given accuracy. The proposed method relies on measuring the TTD indirectly by computing the phase difference between the steady-state parts of the received signals in the upstream and downstream directions and by using a least-square-sine-fitting technique. This reduces the effect of the jitter noise and the offset, which limit measurement precision at very low flow velocity. The obtained measurement results illustrate the robustness of the proposed method, as we measure the TTD at no-flow conditions, with a precision as low as 10 ps peak-to-peak and a TTD offset of zero, within a temperature range from room temperature to 80 °C. This allows us to reach a smaller minimum detectable flow when compared with previous techniques. The proposed method exhibits a better trade-off between measurement accuracy and system complexity. It can be completely integrated in an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) or incorporated in a CPU- or micro-controller-based system.