Microwave Mass Flow Meter for Industrial Applications based on a Lefthanded Transmission Line Resonator

Abstract

A particulates mass flow meter has been developed using a composite right/left-handed transmission line resonator. The presented sensor principle promises the possibility to design precise particulate solids mass flow meter with moderate costs. The autocorrelation function is applied to the CRLH-resonator in order to detect the velocity information and the material density from a single measurement. The areas of application of these sensors are gas/solids, gas/liquid and liquid/solids flows in various industrial applications.

CRLH-TL Sensors for Flow Inhomogeneties Detection of Pneumatic Conveyed Pulverized Solids

“…empty tube, and the second part represents the phase constant in a loaded state, e.g. mass flow in the conveying tube [2].…”

“…The construction of the sensor is done by using the so-called mushroom structure [2], which consists of copper plates, silver wires attached to them on the one side, and grounded on other side. Such a structure is illustrated in Figure 3.…”

“…However, the existing solutions that are using microwave techniques [2] offer accurate measurements only for homogeneous distributed flows inside the pipeline. The inhomogeneities can occur in several forms, but the most common are gravitational flow and roping flows as shown in Figure 1 [1].…”

“…Especially interesting and challenging are non-intrusive method using microwave techniques [1]. The Composite Left/Right Handed Transmission Line (CRLH-TL) with its special properties was used in [2] in order to detect the mass flow rate and the velocity of the particulate solids. In this concept, series capacitors and shunt inductors are used with simultaneously negative permeability and permittivity -the so called metamaterial, which demonstrated superior properties for several applications [3,4].…”

Metamaterials for Wireless Communications, Radiofrequency Identification, and Sensors

“…Many of them are based on the split ring resonator (SRR) [24,[151][152][153][154][155][156][157][158][159], and many others on the CRLH transmission line [160][161][162][163][164][165][166][167][168][169][170][171][172][173][174], mainly reported by the Group of Professor R. Jakoby at Darmstadt (Germany).…”