Metrological Advantages of Applying Vibration Analysis to Pipelines: A Review

Abstract

Flow rate is a necessary variable in industrial processes and, therefore, there is a wide variety of instruments designed to measure it. However, the most accepted measuring devices have the problem of being invasive or intrusive. The scientific and technological challenge is to achieve measurement by exploiting all the phenomenological possibilities using a non-intrusive, easy-to-install, portable and low-cost mechanism. This paper presents a literature review on the use of vibration analysis in flow rate metrological systems in order to identify research opportunities for the indirect measurement of this magnitude. A promising line of work was found based on soft flow rate sensors that use the analysis of pipeline vibrations integrated into computational intelligence routines, which allows inference of the flow rate value. The findings promote to continue with new technical and scientific challenges.