Experimental Study On The Flow Conditioning Of The Water-pipe Network Installed With Flow Conditioner

Despite the development of more sophisticated flowmeters,orifice meter is widely used because of its simplicity,easy installation and cheapness.Orifice meter can be affected by mean flow distortions(profile asymmetry),swirl and turbulent fluctuation.In practice,it's difficult to achieve the fully developed flow(in terms of both mean flow and turbulence structure)approaches the meter when the meter downstream of the bend,different vavel opending,expander or reducer.Because the bends,different valve opening,expanders and reducers are the source of both asymmetries,swirl and turbulence distortions.To ensure the fully developed flow approaches the meter,it demonstrated that very long lengths of straight pipework upstream of the meter is needed,or some form of flow straighter or conditioner can be introduced into the system.There are a lot of flow conditioners recommended in ISO.In this paper,four of them are picked up and the flow quality of the flow produced downstream of Etoile,AMCA,Tube bundle and Perforated Plate these four flow conditioner are investigated respectively.Firstly,the flow conditioning downstream of the double elbow out-of-plane configuration and the semi open valves are tested with PIV.And the result shows different both in time mean velocity and swirl.After installed with four different flow conditioners respectively,the flow quality shows that Etoile is better than other conditioners in flow distribution and swirl removed when the flow go through the double elbow out-of-plane configuration.But when it's 50% closed valves,tube bundle and Etoile are the best.And whether the pressure loss between the conditioner is withinthe scope of the permit were also tested.At the end of this paper,the influence of the Reynolds number to the work of flow conditioner are measured,and the results show that the work of flow conditioner will not be influenced by the Reynolds number.