Visualization of liquid metal flow by ultrasound Doppler method

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

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.