Metering intelligence for pipeline monitoring

June 26, 2014 5:32 am

 Honeywell released its newest ultrasonic flowmeter designed to help natural gas producers improve efficiency by more-accurately tracking the movement of gas through pipelines. The USM GT400 ultrasonic flowmeter helps to reduce the amount of effort needed to maintain pipeline metering, which is especially critical today given the skills shortage many oil and gas companies are facing as veteran engineers retire.
Honeywell flowmeters are currently used in installations worldwide to measure the volume of gas across the supply and value chain. The USM GT400 measures the volume of natural gas at every stage of its movement, storage and utilisation, which is important because the volume of gas transported via pipelines to consumers is metered for billing purposes.
Compliant with CEESmaRT technology – a secure, cloud-based solution for condition-based monitoring – the USM GT400 provides stability during flow perturbations thanks to its direct-path technology with six measuring paths on three levels. The paths are arrayed in an “X” pattern in horizontal planes. This orientation enables measurement of swirl, cross-flow and asymmetry, as well as transparent path velocity weighting per the Gauss-Chebyshev profile model for compressible fluids.
The USM’s electronics are used to handle path-specific measurements while optimising internal diagnostics. It includes speed of sound (SoS) and flow velocity calculations, signal processing and data storage capabilities, and can interface to flow computers, gas chromatographs and SCADA systems. The meter’s transducer – which operates at standard frequencies of 120 or 200 kHz, and alternate frequencies are available for noisy environments – consists of piezoelectric crystals fully encapsulated in titanium housing for resistance to dirt. This unique configuration is field-replaceable under pressure.
Regulator noise has marginal impact on the flowmeter’s measurements, thanks to Honeywell’s proprietary, MID-approved detection algorithm, coupled with the unique transducer design. This combination extends signal amplitude for a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) versus traditional intrinsically safe transducers.