2006 Innovation Awards for
FLEXIM's WaveInjector Transducer Assembly

In September 2006, Flow Control Honored the Year’s Most Outstanding Technologies. Nominations for the Innovation Awards program were presented to Flow Control readers for open voting in June. Nearly 1000 votes were received from a wide variety of fluid handling-related backgrounds, including academia, consulting and services, government, manufacturing, utilities, and others.

FLEXIM Instrument's patented WaveInjector assembly allows flow transducers to send sound signals into a hot pipe wall via optimized metal coupling plates. The plates decouple the transducers thermally from the hot pipe surface. Much like heat sinks, the heat-radiating surfaces of their geometry is several hundred times greater than the heat-conducting surfaces. In this way, a substantial temperature differential between the surface of the pipe and the transducer is obtained. Even when the temperature of the surface of the pipe exceeds 750 F, the temperature of the transducer is far below the maximum temperature of standard flow transducers. As a result, high-temperature measurements can be performed with FLEXIM's standard ultrasonic flow transducers.

The WaveInjector system supports accuracy of +/- 1.0 percent of rate, repeatability of +/- 0.15 percent, dynamic range of +/- 40 ft/sec (12 m/sec), unlimited pressure range, a temperature range of -140°F to 752°F (-100°C to 400°C) and pipe sizes of 1.5 inch OD and greater.

What the voters said:

• “The FLEXIM device is remarkable, and if I had to pick, it would be the overall winner.”
• “Noncontact, nonintrusive feature is very cool.”
• “The Flexim WaveInjector Transducer is innovative because the sensors are the first link in the flow measurement chain. The accuracy of the sensors is critical to the accuracy of the overall operation.”

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