Using a Flow Sensor in a Steam Billing Application
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This document is part of a comprehensive tutorial on industrial Digital I/O and Counter/Timer hardware. Learn about National Instruments product offerings for digital and timing I/O, the Industrial Feature Set including watchdog timers and isolation, complementary devices like relays, solenoids and encoders, concepts like sinking and sourcing, and see how these devices can be used in your industrial application.
For more information return to the Complete Industrial Digital I/O and Counter/TimerTutorial
Using a Flow Sensor in a Steam Billing Application
Accurate and reliable billing is an essential part of any energy supply company. Several boiler plants across the country are operated by energy companies that export the steam to end users. In order to accurately bill the customers, a system must be implemented to calculate the mass of steam being delivered.
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Because this system requires the calculation of a gas rather than water, the steam meter operates best if it is composed of paddlewheel flow sensor. The Hayward FloSite 2000 Flow Sensor provides a 5-bladed rotor that offers high accuracy, even at low flow rates. This is an ideal choice since it provides a simple square wave output whose frequency is proportional to the rate of flow. The square wave provides the ability to connect it to an affordable counter board, such as the NI 6624, and a computer based measurement system.
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In addition to channel-channel isolation that will allow several sensors to be measured independently of each other and their respective grounds, the NI 6624 also features the NI-TIO chip that assures reliable readings from multiple sensors. The counter board also features digital filters that can be used to remove any glitches that may occur due to bursts of steam or other anomalies in the system.
A typical program used by steam billing system would perform basic frequency measurement operations that would acquire the rates and then log that data to file for later billing use. All of these functions are easily and quickly configured using NI-DAQmx and LabVIEW.
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NI 6624
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