Application Galerie

Ultrasonic flowmeters determine the velocity of a fluid flowing through a pipe by sending an ultrasonic signal across the flow at a skew angle. When there is no flow, the transmitting time between the transmitter and the receiver is the same for the signals sent in the upstream and downstream directions. Otherwise, the wave traveling downstream moves faster than the one traveling upstream, which can be used to ascertain the flow. In many cases, piezoelectric transducers are used to send and receive the ultrasonic wave.

This tutorial shows how to simulate an ultrasonic flowmeter with piezoelectric transducers in the simplified no-flow case. The model is based on the discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method which is well suited for acoustically large transient problems. The Elastic Waves, Time Explicit and the Pressure Acoustics, Time Explicit physics interfaces model the wave propagation in the solid and fluid domains, respectively. The two are connected through the Pair Acoustic-Structure Boundary, Time Explicit multiphysics feature. The piezoelectric transducers are modeled with the Piezoelectric Effect, Time Explicit multiphysics feature that couples the Elastic Waves, Time Explicit and the Electrostatics physics interfaces. The model takes advantage of a geometry assembly and a nonconforming mesh.