An ultrasonic phased-array sensor to measure the velocity profile of open channels

Ultrasonic phased array technology is applied for water flow measurement. An electronic pivoted beam collects echoes over an initially unknown cross section of a pipe or channel. Filtering the echoes in the time and spatial domain in conjunction with flow models, allows calculation of the velocity profile. The hardware and signal processing are described in this article. Furthermore, the performance is demonstrated in a field experiment.