Vortex flowmeters are reliable workhorses for steam measurement—but in high-temperature (>300°C) conditions, poor testing practices can destroy accuracy, damage equipment, and even create safety hazards. This guide breaks down the critical do’s and don’ts to help you get stable data and protect both instruments and personnel.
In cogeneration plants, food processing, and chemical industries, high-temperature steam is not just energy—it’s a measurement challenge. Poor configuration can lead to unstable readings, large deviations, or complete signal loss.
Vortex flowmeter is also known as Karman vortex flowmeter. Vortex flowmeter is a kind of separation flowmeter made by using the principle of natural oscillation of fluid. When a fluid flows at a sufficiently large velocity through an object perpendicular to the direction of the fluid, if the object is of appropriate size, it will produce a neatly aligned and reversed vortex train behind the object along two parallel lines.
As a very special medium, steam will show special phenomena and problems in the process of vortex flowmeter measurement. The key problem is that the vapor density value deviates too much from the design value, which brings significant measurement errors to the measurement results. At present, the mature density measuring instrument has not been successfully applied, which brings certain difficulties to the steam flow measurement.
The vortex flowmeter has a flow meter in the pipeline without output. The reasons for this failure and the corresponding solutions are as follows:
The split vortex flowmeter is a kind of flowmeter suitable for measuring steam at high temperature, which can avoid the influence of interfering signals on the measurement of the instrument. So what are the characteristics of the split vortex flowmeter?
Due to the compressibility of the gas, its flow measurement is more complex than that of the liquid, and the output signal of the vortex flowmeter is related to the gas density in addition to the input signal, and the density of the gas is a function of temperature and pressure (referred to as temperature and pressure).
Installation environment of vortex flowmeter:
Vortex flowmeters are suitable for measuring the mass flow and volume flow of superheated steam, saturated steam, compressed air, general gas, water and low corrosive liquids. We often encounter the following failures in the use of vortex flowmeters:
