Transit-time ultrasonic flow meters present some advantages over other flow meters for district heating industries. They are both accurate and non-intrusive. It is well-known that ultrasonic flow meters are sensitive to installation effects. Installation effects could be static or dynamic. Among the possible dynamic installation effects is pulsating flow. The influence of pulsating flow on the prediction and the zero-crossing operations is investigated. Expressions are found for the prediction error and the zero-crossing error. The relative errors due to the prediction and the zero-crossing are plotted. The prediction error can reach dramatic values while the zero-crossing operation is hardly influenced by flow pulsations.
Different types of errors are generated by pulsations in flows. Among these errors is the sampling error due to a unadapted time-averaging of the flowrate. An improved model for pulsations in flows including harmonics is derived. The localisation of the harmonics is performed by a detector. The period of the pulsations is estimated. It is then possible to reduce the sampling error by performing a correct averaging. The reduction of the sampling error is confirmed by simulations.
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