Continuous ultrasonic flow measurement for aerospace small pipelines

Abstract Aerospace explorations stimulate extensive research on innovative propellant flow measurement technologies in microgravity conditions. Ultrasonic-based measurements have advantages of non-invasive and non-moving-component constructions as well as fast responses to bi-directional flow detection, its applications in aerospace explorations have already been reported. To avoid the shortages of pulse ultrasonic measurement configurations, flow measurement of continuous ultrasonic wave propagation is presented to match the requirements of large measurement range and high precision. Fabrication process and laboratory validations using water flow are presented. Ground experiments show that the linearity of the proposed ultrasonic flow meter is obtained in the measurement range [0, 80 ml/s] which is typical requirement in aerospace applications. Meanwhile, the fitted linear feature from the experimental data matches well the theoretical prediction except the flow prediction of stationary fluid. Under specific configurations, the absolute measurement error is significantly affected by the corresponding Reynolds number. Furthermore, the absolute measurement error is smaller when excitation signals with higher frequency are used if the phase tracking performance for different frequencies is identical.