The clamp-on mounting style employed by the ultrasonic flowmeter provides a number of advantages over traditional mechanical flow measurement techniques such as excellent longevity, low maintenance, no pressure loss, and low installation costs. One other key advantage to this installation method is that it allows the instrument to be used in a portable fashion. This is ideal in situations where industrial factory or water treatment plant maintenance personnel require a single tool to periodically diagnose flows in a multitude of pipes.
One other key advantage of the clamp-on ultrasonic flow meter’s design is that it may be configured and used as a portable flow meter. Portable ultrasonic flow meters are essentially the same as ultrasonic meters used for fixed-install applications with one exception – the electronic display that the clamp on transducers connect to is housed in a miniaturized handheld enclosure instead of a wall-mount or panel mount enclosure. This type of package is ideal for maintenance personnel and technicians that need a portable flow meter to periodically verify flow rates in a variety of pipe sizes and materials.
SmartMeasurement’s portable ultrasonic flowmeters are offered with a number of features and options in order to meet any user requirement for portable flow measurement. These features include either handheld or mini-briefcase style display packages, USB-based or SD card-based data logging, multi-channel transducer configurations for dirty fluids, multiple clamp on transducer sizes to accommodate pipe sizes ranging from ½” to 240”, and the ability to calculate BTU/energy consumption.
SmartMeasurement’s ALSONIC family of products contains several different offerings for portable clamp-on ultrasonic flowmeters. The ALSONIC-HL is a value-priced instrument suitable for clean liquid flows with ≤ 1~2% suspended solids or bubbles. The ALSONIC-DHL is also suitable for clean liquid flows and adds the ability to perform data logging functions and store records on a removable SD card. The ALSONIC-DSP, which is offered in either single-path or dual path transducer configurations is suitable for more difficult applications having up to 30% suspended solids.
Reference: SmartMeasurement