Full-wave numerical simulation of ultrasonic transit-time gas flowmeters

The present work focuses on the numerical simulation of ultrasonic transit-time gas flowmeters using a physical model based on the wave theory. The propagation of the ultrasonic waves is described by the Euler equations which are linearized around a stationary mean flow. These equations are solved by using a Discontinuous Galerkin approach. This numerical method is high-order and has good parallelization properties. To decrease the computational time, the simulation code runs on graphical processing units. A numerical study is performed in order to quantify the influence of high-velocity and turbulent gas flows on the amplitude of the received signals. To this end, several velocity profiles have been computed by means of a fluid dynamics software and provided as input to the acoustic simulation code. Then, the numerical results are compared to experimental data obtained on a gas test rig.