超音波による液体金属流動の可視化

Visualization of liquid metal flow by ultrasound Doppler method

大林 寛生  ; 田坂 裕司*; 武田 靖*

Obayashi, Hironari; Tasaka, Yuji*; Takeda, Yasushi*

過去、液体金属の流動に関する研究は物理的な立場からのものが大半であったが、近年では工業分野での利用の増加に伴い、プラントなどの現場における計測の需要が急速に高まってきている。超音波流速分布計(UVP)は超音波を利用して流体中の速度場を知る手法であり、実験計測の現場における要求に十分に応え得る手法であると考える。本記事では、液体金属流動計測に本手法を適用した幾つかの例を示すとともに、今後の超音波計測技術の可能性を示した。

Ultrasonic velocity profiler (UVP) has been established in fluid mechanics and fluid engineering applications of flow measurement. It is utmost importance to investigate flow structure and behavior of liquid metals when it is used in an active manner not only in heat transportation but also a flowing medium, as is the case for any kinds of situations of fluid flow is involved, and as such, fluid mechanics is applied. It is obvious that any optical method of flow measurement cannot be applied since all the liquid metals are opaque. This meant that non-invasive flow measurement was not possible until the ultrasonic measurement has been established. In the past studies, UVP has been applied to the flow measurement of liquid metal. In this paper, we show some examples which measured the liquid metal flow and introduce a new measurement system based on the UVP techniques.