A New Ultrasonic Flowmeter with Low Power Consumption for Small Pipeline Applications

In order to solve the problem of flow measurement in small pipelines, a new ultrasonic flowmeter has been designed in this paper. The pipe model with built-in reflector and variable diameter is put forward with the purpose of increasing the ultrasonic transmitting path. The low voltage driving circuit is used so as to reduce power consumption. The filter method with temperature compensation is proposed to process the echo signal. The flow measurement error due to acoustic speed is also corrected. The new ultrasonic flowmeter is designed with timing chips TDC-GP22 and the microprocessor MSP430F437, which also reduces power consumption. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the ultrasonic flowmeter is better than 1% and the total power and is lower than 0.21mW.