Measurement of flow rate from a reflected signal
AssigneeFlowCommand Inc.
InventorsJeffrey Garoon, David Shaw
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method and system may be used to measure the fluid flow rate of fluid in a pipeline. In the method and system, a signal may be transmitted by a transducer into the pipeline. The signal may be reflected by the contents of the pipeline and received by a receive transducer. Operations may be performed on the received signal to determine the fluid flow rate.
Claims18
A method for measuring the flow rate of a fluid or gas or multi-phase flow flowing through a pipeline, the method comprising:
- transmitting, by a transmit transducer, a transmitted signal into an outer shell of a pipeline;
- receiving, by a receive transducer, a received signal reflected from the contents of the pipeline;
- filtering, by a computer system, the received signal to remove noise to produce a filtered signal;
- processing, by the computer system, the filtered signal to cancel one or more transmitted signal components in the filtered signal, wherein the processing comprises:
- determining, by the computer system, a complex coefficient to model amplitude and phase of the transmitted signal components;
- scaling and rotating to a correct phase, the transmitted signal, based on the complex coefficient to generate a predicted signal that predicts the transmitted signal components in the received signal;
- and
- subtracting the predicted signal from the filtered signal;
- applying, by the computer system, one or more Goertzel detectors to determine a Doppler frequency from the processed filtered signal;
- deriving, by the computer system, a flow rate from the Doppler frequency.
A non-transitory computer-readable medium containing instructions for measuring the flow rate of a fluid or gas or multi-phase flow flowing through a pipeline, the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising instructions for:
- transmitting a transmitted signal into an outer shell of a pipeline;
- receiving a received signal reflected from the contents of the pipeline;
- filtering the received signal to remove noise to produce a filtered signal;
- processing the filtered signal to cancel one or more transmitted signal components in the filtered signal, wherein the processing comprises:
- determining a complex coefficient to model amplitude and phase of the transmitted signal components;
- scaling and rotating to a correct phase, the transmitted signal, based on the complex coefficient to generate a predicted signal that predicts the transmitted signal components in the received signal;
- and
- subtracting the predicted signal from the filtered signal;
- applying one or more Goertzel detectors to determine a Doppler frequency from the processed filtered signal;
- deriving a flow rate from the Doppler frequency.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.