Particles mass flow rate and concentration measurement using electrostatic sensor

In many industries where flow parameters measurement is essential to control manufacturing process, the use of a reliable, cost effective and high accuracy instrument is an important issue. Appropriate measurement method and design leads to improvement of pneumatic conveyors operation and process efficiency. This paper present an instrumentation design based on passive charge detection using a single electrostatic sensor. Two different sensor electrodes are applied to show the flexibility of electrostatic sensor application. A time domain signal processing algorithm is developed to measurement of mass flow rate and concentration profile from acquired electrical charge signal. The findings is led to a low cost and high accuracy design, the experimental test results of the design shows less than ±5% error between measured parameters and reference reading acquired from the manual weighing

ADAPTIVE METHOD TO PREDICT AND TRACK UNKNOWN SYSTEM BEHAVIORS USING RLS AND LMS ALGORITHMS

This study investigates the ability of recursive least squares (RLS) and least mean square (LMS) adaptive filtering algorithms to predict and quickly track unknown systems. Tracking unknown system behavior is important if there are other parallel systems that must follow exactly the same behavior at the same time. The adaptive algorithm can correct the filter coefficients according to changes in unknown system parameters to minimize errors between the filter output and the system output for the same input signal. The RLS and LMS algorithms were designed and then examined separately, giving them a similar input signal that was given to the unknown system. The difference between the system output signal and the adaptive filter output signal showed the performance of each filter when identifying an unknown system. The two adaptive filters were able to track the behavior of the system, but each showed certain advantages over the other. The RLS algorithm had the advantage of faster convergence and fewer steady-state errors than the LMS algorithm, but the LMS algorithm had the advantage of less computational complexity

Particle size measurement using electrostatic sensor through spatial filtering method

Particle size measurement is important in powder and particle industries in which the particle size affects the productivity and efficiency of the machine, for example, in coal-fired power plants. An electrostatic sensor detects the electric charge from dry particles moving in a pipeline. Analysis of the detected signal can provide useful information about the particle velocity, mass flow rate, concentration and size. Using electrostatic sensors, previous researches studied particle sizing using magnitude dependent analysis which is a highly conditional method where the results can be affected by other parameters such as particle mass flow rate, velocity and concentration. This research proposes a magnitude independent analysis for particle sizing in the frequency domain called spatial filtering method. The solution was started by modeling and analysis of the charge induced to the ring electrode using finite-element analysis to find the sensitivity of electrode. A mathematical model was provided to compute particle position on the radial axis of the electrode and then a new technique was proposed to extract a single particle size from the calculated particle radial position. To validate the proposed method experimentally, a sensor was designed and five test particles ranging from 4 mm to 14 mm were selected for measurement. The results show a 0.44 mm estimation error between the estimated and expected results. The results also show that the method is promising for the establishment of a reliable and cost-effective solid particle sizing system

Sensing and filtering characteristics of electrostatic sensors for pneumatically conveyed particles

Electrostatic sensor, which can also be called as triboelectric sensor or electrodynamic sensor, senses the electrostatic charge carried by the dry particle in pneumatic conveyor. Source of the signal induced on the electrostatic sensor is brought by the object to be measured and no excitation circuit is necessary. Electrostatic sensors are used in the process industry due their low cost and robust. This paper describes an investigation into characteristics of circular and rectangular plate shapes of electrostatic sensors. Two parameters were investigated, the effect of sensor area on sensitivity and the spatial filtering effect of the sensor due to its finite size. Models were proposed and results obtained and used to compare with experimental values. It was observed that relationships existed between sensor sensitivity, sensor area and sensor spatial filtering effect

GPU implementation using CUDA

This thesis considers the application of desktop computer video card as a processor to solve two algorithms in medical imaging and sparse matrix operations. The GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) hardware structure in the video card is designed and dedicated to 3D graphic rendering that include matrix and vector operation. To reconstruct the Magnetic Resonance Images, we apply IFFT that is a fast algorithm for Fourier transforms and has a parallel structure that can be used in GPU processor. Another experiment for GPU application is sparse matrix operations. Two case studies to work with sparse matrix operations are 662_bus and 494_bus admittance matrices. We apply these two matrices to obtain lines current. We Implement the algorithms on GPU GeForce GTX 295 in CUDA platform at Visual C++ Host compiler, the results show 7X speedup when the same kernels running on CPU Phentom™ II X4 2.6GHz

Particle size measurement using electrostatic sensor

Electrostatic sensors have a simple but robust structure, which can detect the electric charge from moving charged particles. Measurement of the dry particle mass flow rate, velocity, and concentration in a conveyor are the main areas of sensor application. This paper considers the measurement methods and techniques that utilize electrostatic sensors for instrumentation. The most significant applications of the sensor are reviewed and a newly developed technique in particle sizing using the spatial filtering method is explained. The results of the study re-emphasize the flexibility, reliability and cost-effective features of the electrostatic sensor for industrial applications

Review of electrostatic sensor applications

Electrostatic sensors have a simple but robust structure, which can detect the electric charge from moving charged particles. Measurement of the dry particle mass flow rate, velocity, and concentration in a conveyor are the main areas of sensor application. This paper considers the measurement methods and techniques that utilize electrostatic sensors for instrumentation. The most significant applications of the sensor are reviewed and a newly developed technique in particle sizing using the spatial filtering method is explained. The results of the study re-emphasize the flexibility, reliability and cost-effective features of the electrostatic sensor for industrial applications

Determination of concentration profile for flowing solid particles in pipeline using electric charge tomography system

Tomography aims to present an image of a cross-sectional distribution of materials in some regions of interest such as cross-section of a pipeline or process vessel. This paper presents the concentration profiles of solid particles across a conveying pipeline obtained using tomographic imaging. In the paper, 16 electrodynamic sensors were installed around the circumference of a pipeline to capture electric charges carried by the particles moving through the pipeline under gravity. The Cartesian coordinate system used to derive the system equation gave an accurate charge distribution while the meshing technique of the finite element method applied miniaturized the pixel sizes within the sensing zone. The problem of unstable matrix and weak signal response around the center of the pipe cross-section, normally associated with the electric charge tomography system, was addressed using matrix compression through transposition and filtering. The pro rata distribution method mostly applied in the financial accounting analysis was used in the final stage. An algorithm for realization of the concepts was developed using MATLAB. The qualities of the resulting images for four different flow regimes provide good quality images representing the distribution of the particles across the pipeline cross-sectio

Sentivity characteristics of electrostatic sensor using finite element modeling

Electrostatic sensor detects the electric charge carried by dry particle in a pneumatic conveyor. Sensitivity characteristics of the Electrostatic sensor play an important role to design a flow measurement system. In this study, the sensitivity features of the ring shape electrodes are simulated to find the effect of electrode geometry on sensor sensitivity. Ansys Maxwell 14.0 is utilized as an electric field simulator to measure the amount of induced electrical charge from a particle to the sensor electrode in a 3D environment using finite-element analysis. The results precisely show the sensitivity characteristics between electrodes with different thickness, axial length and diameter