A plate waveguide design for ultrasonic flow measurements in hostile environments

A waveguide bundle consisting of parallel, thin, metallic plates has been designed to be used as a thermal buffer in an ultrasonic flow meter, where each of the plates acts as an independent, low dispersion waveguide. An initial prototype has been built and characterized using both finite element modeling and experimental measurements. Initial experiments in water have shown that even with little optimization, it is possible to use these waveguides in transmit-receive type experiments.