Introduction The objective and purpose of experiment six was to use flow meters to measure volumetric flow rate of water through a pump, and to better understand how common flow meters are used in everyday living. There are many real world …show more content…
When the pump is turned on water enters the tank through a hose where different segments contained vortex shedding meter and paddlewheel meter. The center of the tank contained a bucket where water flowed into it. The bucket is also attached to a lever on a fulcrum that allowed it to raise and lower. The Venturi meter and orifice meter also had a small tube that is connected to the vertical board on the top. The first step of this experiment was to turn on the main control valve and to start the flow pump system. Then set the rotameter reading to each of the 5, 10, 15, 20, and 22 that were needed for this experiment. For the 5 and 10 reading, one mass that weighed in at 6 kg was added to the system, and for the rest 12 kg mass was added. The air pump that was used at the scale reading of 5 increased the pressure on the water levels in the tube. On two of those tubes, the pressure difference allowed the reading of the orifice and the Venturi meters. There were also two devices connected to the system that allowed for the reading of the paddlewheel and vortex shedding meter. Then using the factors given in the lab manual all readings were converted to the correct …show more content…
Then it was lowered until the buckets was completely full and tipped over. From the point of the lowering until the bucket rised, the time was kept. The change in time was written in the data sheet. The mass was then multiplied by a factor of 3 to determine the final mass of water that were filled up in the bucket for each run. This total mass was then divided by the time to determine the mass flow rate; furthermore, it was then divided by the density of water to find the volumetric flow rate. The last few steps of the experiment were to pot the volumetric flow rate versus the square root of two times the change in pressure reading divided by the density of water. The same process was also done for the Venturi meter. Trend lines are then added onto each plot, and the slope off each of the lines were then recorded.
Results
Figure 4 below shows the plot of volumetric flow versus rotameter reading. The sensitivity of the rotameter from the trend line that is shown below in the figure showed that it was 7x〖10〗^5 for this particular system. The linearity error for this system was calculated to be 0.000004. That meant the readings that were recorded for this system was both accurate and precise for volumetric flow rate and rotameter