A pulsed phase measurement ultrasonic flowmeter for medical gases

Pneumotachometers are used to measure instantaneous flowrate in the respiratory gas streams. The presently available devices suffer from lack of linearity, slow response times, and gas density sensitivity. A new design of an ultrasonic gas flowmeter is presented in this paper: We investigate the acoustic characteristics of ring and piston shaped transducers, and describe a sampling method to avoid the error due to reflection. A microcomputer is used to overcome the 360° detection ambiguity problem associated with phase detection technique. This design has been tested in clincial settings and has been shown to give linear response, independent of gas density, and to have a wide dynamic range.