Development of a high-fidelity partitioned Fluid–Structure Interaction model of an Omega-shaped Coriolis Mass Meter and comparison with experimental data

Coriolis Mass Meters (CMMs¹) are devices for measuring the mass flow rate of a flow in a pipe by a mechanism based on exciting a specific mode shape of the flow-meter's structure and analyzing the system's response to the interaction between the vibrating CMM's structure and the flow. This interaction manifests itself as a phase-shift between the signals captured by the motion detection sensors, located on the CMM's structure. By design, a characteristic of the CMMs is the linear relation between the induced phase-shift and the mass flow rate in a wide range of flow regimes. Due to the complexity of such dynamic systems, low-fidelity numerical models are often not capable of capturing the relevant physics and, therefore, cannot be relied on in the design process of the CMMs. The goal of this paper is to develop a physically significant and reliable high-fidelity Fluid–Structure Interaction (FSI) model of Omega-shaped CMMs which can be used in the virtual design scenarios. Such a model is useful for e.g. parametric studies and importance rating of parameters. In order to achieve that goal, different modeling aspects, simulation and post-processing techniques are systematically assessed. The result is a numerical model based on strongly coupled partitioned FSI between the CMM's structure and the fluid passing through it. Both fluid and structural domains are discretized using finite element method (FEM). The induced phase-shift due to FSI is calculated for a range of mass flow rates. It is verified that the calculated phase-shift from the simulations varies linearly with the mass flow rate. Furthermore, the numerical results are compared to and are in good agreement with experimental results. Hence, the developed high-fidelity model is shown to be accurate enough to be used for designing and enhancing the performance of Omega-shaped CMMs, affirming the relevance of the thoroughly discussed modeling aspects.