Design and Development of SAW Sensor Based Wireless Target Type Flow Transmitter

Target flowmeter is commonly used for measuring flow rates, but there are some shortcomings of the conventional target flowmeter, such as complex structure, low sensitivity, non-linearity. Here, a Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) sensor-based target flowmeter has been proposed where a SAW sensor is placed on the target rod of the flowmeter. When liquid flows through the pipe in contact with the target rod, the force is produced. This force then acts on the target rod and deflects the target rod from its original position, which results strain in it. SAW sensor senses the strain level at different flow rates, and the output is in terms of delayed time response of the order of a nanosecond. The output is non-linear with respect to the flow rate and it is linearized with the help of a neural network technique. This minimizes the non-linearity error up to 0.27% of full-scale output (FSO). The modification in the target type flowmeter is done with the help of the SAW sensor in such a way that the flow transmitter can transmit sensed information through the wireless channel. Simulation and mathematical approaches are reported in this paper for the range of 0 to 1200 LPH.