NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF COMPRESSIBLE EFFECT IN THE FLOW METERING BY CLASSICAL VENTURIMETER

The Venturimeter is a typical obstruction type flow meter, widely used in industries for flow measurement. The ISO standard (ISO-5167-1) provides the value of discharge coefficient for the classical machined Venturimeter in turbulent flows with Reynolds number above 2×105 at standard conditions. In the present work, an attempt is made to study and develop a computational model of a Venturimeter, which can be used as an efficient and easy means for predicting the compressibility effect using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. ANSYS FLUENT-14 has been used as a tool to perform the modeling and simulation of flow through Venturimeter. Analysis of flow through Venturimeter has demonstrated the capability of the CFD methodology for predicting accurately the values of Cd, ε and CPL over a wide range of operating conditions. CFD methodology also has been used to analyze the effect of various parameters like surface roughness, convergent and divergent angle as well as turbulent intensity of the incoming flow on the expansibility factor It has been demonstrated that the validated CFD methodology can be used to predict the performance parameters of a classical Venturimeter even under conditions not covered by ISO 5167-1 standards