Flow Motion
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 15:53:00 BST
Gary Lucas and his team pioneer important new technology that monitors different rates of flow in a single pipeline
RESEARCHERS at the University of Huddersfield, headed by Professor Gary Lucas (pictured left), have made a major breakthrough in the form of a flow meter which uses electromagnetic imaging techniques in order to show the different rates of flow of multiple substances in a pipeline.
Process industries such as oil and gas will be among the principal beneficiaries of the new technology, which will furnish them with invaluable data that can lead to substantial gains in efficiency and therefore cost savings.
“There have been electromagnetic flow meters that measure just the average single velocity in a pipe,” says Professor Lucas. “But until now there hasn’t really been anything that has been able to measure distributions of velocity. That is the novel aspect of our research. This is important because if, for example, you have a horizontal pipeline with most of the oil flowing quickly along the top and most of the water flowing slowly at the bottom you can’t work out the exact oil and water flow rates unless you can differentiate the velocities in different parts of the pipe.”
The new electromagnetic multiple flow meter (pictured below) is a product of projects funded to the tune of £400,000 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward. The research was triggered by the needs of various process industries to be able to measure multiple flows – including the mineral processing and chemical processing industries.
The device that has been developed sits in a pipeline. An array of electrodes is used to provide vivid images of the multiple flows.
“The main development so far has been in relation to the oil industry,” says Professor Lucas. “But we are now aiming to extend the technology even to medical applications, looking at the circulation of blood in limbs, which is important in many areas of diagnosis.”
The food industry is among a large number of other potential beneficiaries.
Professor Lucas has been in talks with a number of companies interested in developing the product and the patent process is underway.
Meanwhile the University of Huddersfield team working on the project has seen the addition of a new research fellow, Hungarian-born Dr Laszlo Kollar (pictured left). A mathematician with background in fluid mechanics, he has arrived from the University of Quebec and one of his roles is to make further improvements in the quality of the images achieved by the electro-magnetic multiple flow meter.
