Experimental Study of Aerodynamic Behavior Downstream of Three Flow Conditioners

The present work is concerned a comparative study of the decay of swirling turbulent pipe flow downstream of three flow conditioners, the Etoile, the Tube bundle, and the Laws perforate plate, and its effect on accuracy of orifice plate flow meter. The swirl was generated by a double 90° degrees elbows in perpendicular planes. The discharge coefficients were measured with 3 different orifice meters with β = 0.5, 0.62, 0.70 at different Reynolds number. As a conclusion, the experimental study of the three flow conditioners used separately shows that the flow need longer distance for close to fully developed pipe flow and some errors, by reason of the swirl, on the discharge coefficient were inevitable for distance less 12D.Copyright © 2002 by ASME