Energy metering system for high quality saturated steam

For accurate measurement of steam flow rate, the dryness fraction has to be included in the flow rate calculation; the dryness fraction is also a parameter that often needs to be monitored for effective process control and for condition monitoring of the plant. It is notoriously difficult, however, to measure dryness fraction easily and accurately. In this paper, an energy metering system which measures the steam quality, mass flow rate and thus the energy of the steam is proposed and tested. The system consists of a separator and condensate flowmeter followed by a steam flowmeter; the output signals of these devices are fed into a microcomputer which contains the characteristics of the devices and formulations for steam properties. Testing of the energy metering system showed that the average differences between the displayed output of the system and the values obtained using a condensate weightank was about 0.22 for the dryness fraction and 1.05 for the saturated steam flow rate. © 1992