Gas Flow Measurement Method with Temperature Compensation for a Quasi-Isothermal Cavity

Abstract

Pneumatic transmission is a technology that uses compressed air as a power source to drive and control various mechanical equipment to realize the mechanization and automation of production processes. With the development of industrial mechanization and automation, pneumatic technology, represented by pneumatic muscle, is increasingly becoming more widely used in various fields. The current standards for research are more complex for the measurement of flow without a flowmeter, some of them do not consider the influence of temperature change on flow measurement, and some of them are simplified as adiabatic or isothermal models, which are inaccurate measurement methods in actual practical application. This paper describes a method to determine flow rate by measuring the pressure change in the process of gas tank inflation. This study used the method of temperature compensation to eliminate the influence of temperature in the isothermal formula. The measurement structure was simple and the calculation was accurate, which has a certain practical significance. Based on this method, charging experiments were carried out with a gas tank that had a volume of 3 L or 5 L with or without copper wire filling, and the experimental results were used in the processed research. The temperature compensation parameters were identified with or without an isothermal environment and in different sizes of tanks. This method identified the different parameters of the 5 L tank and 3 L tank. Finally, the flow compensation was completed for the gas tank filled with copper wire. After verification, the results of the quasi-isothermal calculation formula and temperature compensation formula were close to those measured by a high-precision flow sensor in the experiment. The method introduced in this study is a novel flow calculation method that is simple in structure and accurate in calculation compared with the conventional isothermal calculation method; furthermore, it can be used in real world situations without the need for a high-precision flow sensor.