Study of a Modified Obstruction Free Pressure Sensor Based Flow Transducer Using Hall Sensors

Abstract

In the present paper, a modified obstruction free pressure sensor-based flow transducer has been developed using Hall sensors. This technique is a modified version of the earlier inductive method. In this transducer, the fluid pressure in the pipeline is taken as the flow sensing parameter, and various drawbacks of the earlier inductive technique are eliminated. A prototype unit of the transducer is developed and studied in the present work. The transducer consists of two identical C-type Bourdon gauges, each fitted with an identical permanent magnet and Hall sensor assembly to sense the fluid pressure under flow condition and static pressure under no flow condition. The difference between the two Hall sensor outputs is found to vary nonlinearly with flow rate. The mathematical relations describing the working of the prototype unit are derived in the paper. The static characteristic curves of the proposed flow transducer are determined experimentally and reported in the paper. The characteristic curves are found to follow the derived equations to a very good extent with negligible percentage deviation from best-fit nonlinear characteristic.