Further Study of the Sensing Ring Position on the Orifice-Type Capacitive Flow Sensor.

The flow head of an orifice-type capacitive flow sensor for a conducting liquid consists of a vertically mounted metallic orifice plate in a horizontal pipeline made of insulating material and a rigidly grounded metallic ring or sensing ring placed surrounding the pipeline at a small distance from the orifice plate where the capacitance between the orifice plate and the sensing ring follows a linear relationship with flow rate as reported in the literature. In this paper, a further study on the effect of position of the sensing ring on the sensor capacitance has been carried out along with the modification of the simple parallel plate capacitance principle described in the earlier work by the real disk-type capacitance principle. From this paper, it has been observed that for any position of the sensing ring near the orifice plate, the sensor capacitance decreases linearly with the increase of flow rate and follows the modified capacitance principle similarly as that observed in earlier work. It has also been observed that the sensing ring distance-sensor capacitance product increases almost linearly with the increase of sensing ring distance. From the experimental study of the proposed orifice type capacitive flow sensors installed on two different pipelines, the said modified theory of the sensor appears to be verified in the present paper where the experimental results are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]