Improved frictional modeling for the pressure-time method

Abstract The pressure-time method is classified as a primary method for measuring discharge in hydraulic machinery. The uncertainty in the discharge determined using the pressure-time method is typically around ± 1.5 %; however, despite dating back almost one hundred years in time, there still exists potential to reduce this uncertainty. In this paper, an improvement of the pressure-time method is suggested by implementing a novel formulation to model the frictional losses arising in the evaluation procedure. By analyzing previously obtained data from CFD, laboratory and full-scale pressure-time measurements it is shown that the new friction model improves the accuracy of the flow rate calculation by approximately 0.1-0.2 percentage points, compared to currently utilized friction models. Despite being a small absolute improvement, the new friction model presents an important development of the pressure-time method because the relative improvement is significant.