Introduction to Flow

This article is about the Introduction of 3rd important industrial parameter which is “Flow”

Flow is a very fast acting industrial parameter. It is one of the costly parameters in industries to measure and use for further process requirements. It is fully termed as “Flow rate” when measured. To make it simple for you, flow rate is a term used for certain volume or mass of fluid (anything which flows is a fluid like air, water, gas, liquids etc.) moving with a velocity in a defined area. Hence, the units for flow rates are categorised in to two major domains. They are Volumetric flow rates and Mass flow rates.

Commonly used units for volumetric flow rates are:

  • m3/hr or CMH (Cubic meter per hour)
  • GPM (Gallons per minute)
  • LPM / LPH (Litres per minute or hour)
  • CFM / CFH / CFD (Cubic feet per minute or hour or day)
  • CMD / CFD (Cubic meter per day or Cubic feet per day)
  • MMCMD / MMCMH (Million metric cubic meter per day or hour)

Commonly used units for mass flow rates are:

  • Kg/hr (Kilogram per hour)
  • tonnes/hr (Tonnes per hour)

We have seen many examples of flow rates in our day to day life like, water flow in a pipe line in our residential buildings, cooking LPG gas in yellow pipelines in our residential buildings, air flow in ventilator machines in hospital, and of course proper industrial fluids flow examples in industrial areas like acids flow, gases flow, steam flow and many more.

Flow parameter is strongly related with pressure, temperature & density especially in cases of gas flow rate measurement where slight change in pressure, temperature or density of gas results into severe change in gas flow rates.

For liquids & gases, many type of principles were invented and were developed with time and fortunately in today’s era , we are having  multiple successfully proven flow measuring techniques and instruments which measure flow rate of a small value of 1 LPM till up to 10 MMSCMD with accuracy up to 0.3%.

Flow parameter is also a very important to know for an Instrumentation Engineer as the same is highly encountered in all the applications, projects and work profiles. The importance of Flow and its measurement has been developed a lot in last 20 years. However, instengg.com is here to help you in guiding you and making you aware about all those Flow measurements with respect to instrumentation approach.

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