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Masaki Takamoto
Group Leader
e-mail: takamoto@nrlm.go.jp
Flow Measurement Section,
National Research Laboratory of Metrology,
1-4, Umezono-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan
Introduction
Many kinds of gases are used as process gases in semiconductor industries or as calibration gases for instruments used in environmental measurements and so on. Presently, a thermal type
mass flow controller MFC is mainly used to control and measure
gas flow rates in these fields. However, when a gas flow rate is
measured by a MFC, which is not calibrated by that gas, the
output of the MFC must be corrected with a questionable correction factor. Thus, the reliability and accuracy of flow measurements is questionable in such cases. Therefore, the development
of a highly accurate flow measurement technique independent of
the kind of gas is required.
National Research Laboratory of Metrology NRLM has developed the flow measurement technique using the critical Venturi
nozzles to transfer the standard of small mass flow rates of gases
Nakao and Takamoto 1 to accreditation laboratories. Ishibashi
et al. 2 designed super-fine manufactured critical Venturi
nozzles, which have exactly the same shape as the nozzle used in
the theoretical analyses of Geropp 3, and found that the measured discharge coefficients of these nozzles were within 0.03
percent of the theoretical estimation which was developed by Ishibashi and Takamoto 4 based on the analysis of Hall 5 and
Geropp 3. The theoretically determined discharge coefficient is
described by two parameters determined under the assumptions
that a core flow is isentropic and a perfect gas, which are a function of the specific heat ratio and the nozzle shape. Thus, if a gas
is close to the perfect gas state, the discharge coefficient of the
critical Venturi nozzle for that gas can be theoretically determined
using these two parameters. Nakao et al. 6 measured the discharge coefficients of the critical Venturi nozzle for ten gases
including CO2 and SF6 . And the results showed that the measured
discharge coefficients for the gases tested, except CO2 and SF6 ,
were within 0.6 percent of the theoretical estimation developed
by Ishibashi 4. However, the results of CO2 and SF6 were 2
percent larger than the theoretical estimation.
This paper describes the results of the discharge coefficients for
CO2 and SF6 measured for the four critical Venturi nozzles with
different throat diameters, and the behaviors of the two parameters
describing the discharge coefficient were investigated and the flow
fields at the throat were discussed to explain the large deviations
found in these gases.
Contributed by the Fluids Engineering Division for publication in the JOURNAL
OF FLUIDS ENGINEERING. Manuscript received by the Fluids Engineering Division
January 10, 2000; revised manuscript received August 17, 2000. Associate Technical
Editor: P. Bearman.
(1)
where Q m is the actual mass flow rate and Q mth is the theoretical
mass flow rate calculated from the throat condition and is written
as
Q mth A * c * ,
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of the ISO type toroidal throat Venturi nozzle and their throat diameters
(7)
and the fitted curve determined by the least square method from
the data in Fig. 3 was 0.05 percent for SF6 . It should be noticed
that the results for CO2 and SF6 are quite different from other
gases.
The uncertainty of the discharge coefficient consists of the
components summarized in Table 1. The standard uncertainty of
the calibration facility, by which the discharge coefficient of the
critical nozzle is determined, depends on the flow rate and the
kind of gas, and the maximum values for N2 , CO2 , and SF6 on
the present flow rate range are listed in Table 1. The repeatability
of the measurement, which is determined from the measurements
of the upstream pressure and temperature of the nozzles, was
0.043 percent under the present experimental conditions. Another
important component is the uncertainty of the throat diameter,
which depends on the resolution of the measuring tool. The throat
diameter of the critical nozzle was measured by the measuring
tool with the resolution of 1 m. Therefore, the relative standard
Experimental Results
The discharge coefficient of the critical Venturi nozzle was determined by the gravimetric calibration facility of NRLM Nakao
and Takamoto 1. When the test gas was changed, the whole
facility was purged with the new test gas for two whole days. As
the vapor rate included in the bottled gases used here was less
than 0.01 percent, the vapor effect on the gas density was neglected. The critical nozzles used here are an ISO type toroidal
throat Venturi nozzle as shown in Fig. 1. The radius of curvature
at the throat is twice D, and the diffuser with a half angle of 3
degrees is three times D in length. The throat diameters of the
critical Venturi nozzles used here are listed in Fig. 1. The critical
nozzles were manufactured at the center of the disk by the machining technique and the throat diameter was measured along
four different diameters by the profile projector with the resolution of 1 m and the averaged value of the four measurements
was used as the throat diameter.
The Reynolds number dependency of the discharge coefficient
was investigated for each gas by changing the upstream pressure
of the critical nozzle from 30 kPa to 300 kPa. The results are
shown in Fig. 2, in which the symbol is the result of the
gases in Nakao et al. 6, that is, N2 , Ar, He, H2 , O2 , CH4 ,
C2H2 , and C2H6 . It is found from this figure that the discharge
coefficients strongly depend on the kind of gas and the smaller the
Reynolds number, the stronger the Reynolds number dependency
of the discharge coefficient. The transverse axis of this figure is
the theoretical Reynolds number defined in Eq. 3. The results in
Fig. 2 are plotted in Fig. 3 versus the square root of the inverse of
the theoretical Reynolds number. The symbol is also the
results of Nakao et al. 6. Figure 3 shows that the linear relation
of Eq. 4 can be applied to all gases tested. The maximum standard deviation of the residual between the experimental results
Journal of Fluids Engineering
References
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