Mechanical Flow Meters
A bucket and a stopwatch is an analogy for the operation of a positive displacement meter The stopwatch is started when the flow starts, and stopped when the bucket reaches its limit. The volume divided by the time gives the flow rate. For continuous measurements, we need a system of continually filling and emptying buckets to divide the flow without letting it out of the pipe. These continuously forming and collapsing volumetric displacements may take the form of pistons reciprocating in cylinders, gear teeth mating against the internal wall of a meter or through a progressive cavity created by rotating oval gears or a helical screw.
Read more about this topic: Flow Measurement
Famous quotes containing the words mechanical, flow and/or meters:
“Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul;”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“In our Mechanics’ Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter’s planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,—rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)