PIERS ONLINE, VOL. 3, NO. 5, 2007 704 Numerical Model of Inductive Flowmeter P. Fiala, T. Jirku, and I. Behunek Department of Theoretical and Experimental Electrical Engineering, Brno University of Technology Kolejni 2906/4, Brno 612 00, Czech Republic Abstract— This article deals with physical and chemical processes during measurement with an inductive flowmeter. A theoretical model and an example of numerical solution are presented here. We prepared numerical models based on the combined finite element method (FEM) and the finite volume method (FVM) of one of the three variants and computed the output voltage of the flowmeter electrodes. The model joins the magnetic, the electric and the current fields, the flow field and a chemical nonlinear ion model. The results were obtained by means of the FEM/FVM as a main application in ANSYS software. DOI: 10.2529/PIERS061006093241 1. INTRODUCTION The full electro-hydro-dynamical (EHD) model of an inductive flowmeter is a coupled problem. There are coupled electric, magnetic, fluid flow fields and electric circuit and chemical (ions) models, Fig. 1. This model was solved with combined finite element methods (FEM) and finite volume methods (FVM). Results from the numerical model and the experiments were compared and the numerical equality was very good. v I c I c B x y z o U L I L E 1 E 2 J Γ Ω γ Figure 1: Principle of the induction flowmeter. 2. NUMERICAL MODEL According to the research report [1], the electromagnetic part of the flowmeter is derived from reduced Maxwell equations rot H =0, (1) div B =0, (2) where H is the vector of magnetic field intensity, B is the vector of magnetic field induction, J is the vector of current density. rot E =0, (3) div J =0, (4)