Development of a multi-path ultrasonic flow meter for the application to feedwater flow measurement in nuclear power plants

In this work, we propose a method to measure the feedwater flow using multi-path ultrasonic flow meter (UFM). Since the UFM measures a path velocity at which the ultrasonic wave is propagated, the flow profile may be important to convey the path velocity to the velocity averaged over the entire cross section of the flowing medium. The conventional UFM has used the smooth-wall circular pipe model presented by Nikurades. However, this model covers a lower range which is less than 3.2 million while the Reynolds number of the feedwater flow in operating nuclear power plants (NPPs) is about 20 million. Therefore, we feedwater flow in operating nuclear power plants (NPPs) is about 20 million. Therefore, we proposed the non-linear correlation model that combines the ratio between the DP output and proposed the non-linear correlation model that combines the ratio between the DP output and UFM output. Experiments were performed using both computer simulation and newly constructed NPPs' test data. The uncertainty analysis result shows that the proposed method has reasonably lower uncertainty than conventional UFM