Development of a two‐wire thermal flow sensor for industrial applications

Thermal flow sensors with a wide dynamic range are at present not available in spite of the large demand which exists for such sensors in practical fluid flow measurements. In this paper, it is shown that the velocity range of a “time‐of‐flight” thermal flowmeter for slowly changing flows can be increased by using wires (or other heating/sensing elements) with large thermal inertia (time constant) and heating the sending wire with a continuous sinusoidal current, instead of discrete, very short, square‐wave pulses as in the usual pulsed‐wire anemometer. The device described here uses two parallel wires of 12.5μm diameter and its usable speed range is 0.05 to 25m/s. Although the present thermal flowmeter can be applied as a point measurement device, the main applications are in pipe flow, especially at very low flow rates. The high sensitivity at low flow rates makes the device especially suitable for this purpose.