Development of the Multichannel Pulsed Ultrasonic Doppler Velocimeter for the measurement of liquid metal flow

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel multichannel pulsed ultrasonic Doppler velocimeter capable of accurately measuring 2D2C velocity fields in opaque liquid metal flows with high spatial and temporal resolution, validated against PIV and tested across various flow conditions.

Contribution

The study introduces a new ultrasonic velocimeter system specifically designed for liquid metal flows, demonstrating high accuracy and resolution validated through comparison with PIV and application in liquid metal.

Findings

MPUDV achieves 50 Hz and 3 mm resolution.

Less than 3% difference with PIV measurements.

Successfully measures flow structures in liquid metal at different Reynolds numbers.

Abstract

In the present study, by adopting the advantage of ultrasonic techniques, we developed a Multichannel Pulsed Ultrasonic Doppler Velocimetry (MPUDV) to measure the 2D2C velocity fields of liquid metal flow. Due to the specially designed Ultrasonic host and post-processing scheme, the MPUDV system can reach a high spatiotemporal resolution of 50 Hz and 3 mm. The flow loop contains a cavity test section to ensure a classical recirculating flow was built to validate the accuracy of MPUDV in velocity field measurement. In the initial phase of the study, water with tracer particles was selected as the working liquid to ensure the velocity field measurements by the well-developed Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). A comparison of the data obtained from the PIV and MPUDV methods revealed less than 3 differences in the 2D2C velocity field between the two techniques during simultaneous measurements of the same flow field. This finding strongly demonstrates the reliability of the MPUDV method developed in this paper. Moreover, the ternary alloy GaInSn was selected as the working liquid in the flow loop to validate the efficacy of the MPUDV in measuring 2D-2C velocity fields. A series of tests were conducted in the cavity at varying Reynolds numbers, ranging from 9103 to 24123. The measurements demonstrated that the MPUDV could accurately measure the flow structures characterized by a central primary circulation eddy and two secondary eddies in the opaque liquid metal. Furthermore, it was found that the vortex center of the primary circulating eddy and the size of the secondary eddies undergo significant alterations with varying Reynolds numbers, indicating the influence of inertial force on the flow characteristics in the recirculating flow. It is therefore demonstrated that the current MPUDV methodology is applicable for measuring a 2D2C velocity field in opaque liquid metal flows.