This paper explains the general working principle of gas turbine meters and the common causes for turbine metering errors. Field observations and laboratory test examples are presented in this paper to demonstrate these phenomena. The author also suggests methods to optimize the measurement performance of turbine meter installations.
How Turbine Meters Work
Turbine gas meters are inferential meters. A gas turbine meter is essentially a machine that converts a portion of the kinetic energy of a moving stream of gas into rotational movement of a rotor. It measures gas flow volume indirectly by registering the number of revolutions of the rotor. At a given flow rate Q, the rotor of the turbine meter would spin at an angular velocity ωi as shown in Figure 1.