Titan Enterprises, a leading UK design and manufacturer of liquid flow measurement sensors, presents a comparison of their flowmeter types that will influence the suitability for your process application.
Doing things differently, better, and more cost-effectively for our customers, has been our design philosophy since Titan Enterprises launched its first flowmeter sensor in 1981. With market-leading innovation, Titan’s liquid flow measuring products and technology are industry proven on a global scale for use within a wide range of process and industrial applications.
With both standard flow measurement devices and OEM modifications or unique designs to accommodate customer specific applications, Titan’s flexibility and close, long-term customer partnerships have resulted in many OEM manufacturers specifying our products in equipment that will remain in production for many years.
To facilitate a customer’s decision-making process to determine the most suitable flowmeter for their application, the following comparison table highlights the key features of Titan Enterprises’ Turbine, Oval Gear and Ultrasonic flow meters. The more detailed technical specifications of these flow measuring devices can be found on Titan’s website, where a comparison chart of each flowmeter type can also be viewed.
Flow Meter Type | Mini Turbine Flowmeters
“Best value” | Oval Gear Flowmeters
| Ultrasonic Flowmeters
|
Technology | Titan’s small turbine flowmeter range use a radial flow principle based on the Pelton wheel technique. The geometry of the turbine and the fluid chamber ensures that the rotational speed of the rotor is proportional to the flow rate through the device. The low friction obtained with sapphire bearings gives these turbines an excellent dynamic flow range and low flow capability, ideal for low viscosity liquids. | Oval Gears work on the principle of near to true positive displacement. They have a low flow capability and controlled rubbing surfaces to reduce friction. Perfect for more viscous fluids, Titan’s oval gear meters have a greater flow range and improved linearity, with higher viscosity liquids. Specially profiled gears are used for viscosities above 1000cSt. | The combination of Titan’s patented ‘time-of-flight’ technology and their proprietary interface software has resulted in a new generation of ultrasonic flowmeters that work well at low flows and deliver accurate measurements within a wide range of industrial processes. Titan’s ultrasonic meters typically use plane waves where the wavelength of the sound within the liquid is greater than the pipe diameter. This ensures that there is little or no multi-pathing and therefore no echoes and hence low background noise. This improves the linearity and ‘low-end’ i.e. low flow performance, increasing the flow range of a single meter. |
Construction | Metallic and non-metallic options for the meter body, including materials that meet NSF-Approval for use in medical, laboratory, food and drink industries. The combination of materials used to construct the turbine flowmeters ensures chemical compatibility and long-term reliability and stability. | Machined in durable materials with options for non-metallic PEEK, stainless steel or aluminium materials. Sensors suitable for hazardous areas are also available. A pair of PEEK toothed oval gears sit at the heart of the meter, one of which contains chemically resistant magnets. The choice of materials permit Titan’s Oval Gear (OG) devices to be used on water-based liquids as well as lubricating fluids that have a higher viscosity. | Titan’s Metraflow® ultrasonic meter incorporates an FDA-certified PFA tube, providing a fluid path that is totally non-metallic for very aggressive fluids. The Atrato® can be either stainless steel or glass with PEEK in both cases. The compact Industrial Process Atrato® is stainless steel with PEEK and due to its compact design and our data processing, has a curved flow tube. This, we believe, is the only ultrasonic flow meter with a looped flow tube. |
Product Life | Standing Titan apart from our competitors is our 3 or 5-piece bearing assembly. Titan use robust low friction sapphire bearings that give prolonged reliability and long life to the turbine meter itself. In addition, the bearing contact area of Titan’s mini turbines is relatively large, hence bearing loads are much less than other mini turbine bearing systems. | Titan’s oval gears are carbon filled PEEK as this material is mouldable and has excellent low friction properties, very similar to the old industry standard phosphor-bronze bearings. It also has good temperature capabilities and excellent chemical resistance. All of Titan’s gears are precision moulded and then lightly machined to ensure consistency of the bearing surfaces and long-term performance. | The Atrato® ultrasonic flowmeters have no moving parts, virtually eliminating mechanical wear, critical for long-life and repeatability. Both the patented technology, body design and Titan’s proprietary interface software have gone through several upgrades since it was first released, meeting technological advances and customer application needs. The Process Atrato® has even been tested in antigravity environments. |
Performance | The flow chamber of Titan’s turbine flowmeters is specially shaped to induce peripheral vortices around the chamber, reducing fluidic drag at lower flows. Accuracy is at ±1.0 / ±2.0% FSD (for the 800 series mini turbines). Even for larger flows where some of the liquid can bypass the turbine chamber, accuracy is still maintained and the output remains linear. | Because the high ratio between the driving force versus the resistance of the gears to rotate, these OG flowmeters are capable of very low flows and require minimal differential pressure to begin rotating. They are also capable of high flows with excellent accuracy, even with low viscosity liquids. Titan’s OGs give an accuracy from ±0.5% for oil and water flow. By nature, these devices perform better at higher viscosities as the increasing fluid thickness reduces the leakage rate around the gears even further and extends the useful operating range to lower flow rates. | Titan’s flow meters are calibrated on one of our traceable flow rigs which typically have a volumetric uncertainty of ~0.05%. The basic linearity of the Atrato® range is ±0.5% of reading for most of the flow range. The Atrato’s signal processing system permits flow measurement across the whole Reynolds number range allowing both viscous and non-viscous products to be measured accurately. The very high signal to noise ratio from these ultrasonic devices has been widely proven to enable metering of extremely low flows (down to 2ml) with great precision. |
“Most durable”
“Most versatile”
The basic physical techniques that flowmeters work to are well established; it’s the latest technology and materials that are applied which give the wide variety of choices in the market. Titan Enterprises are specialist design and manufacturers of turbine, oval gear and ultrasonic flow measuring devices. However, additional broad groups of flowmeters can be explored further in our technical paper. The following table indicates the suitability of a broader range of flow sensors for a variety of applications.
For further information on Titan Enterprises’ flowmeter and instrument range, please visit https://flowmeters.co.uk/. To discuss an optimised flow measurement device for your OEM application please contact Titan Enterprises on +44 (0)1935 812790 or email sales@flowmeters.co.uk
For more information please contact:
Media: Mrs Samantha Hannay, Marketing Manager, Titan Enterprises
+44 (0)1935 812790 / samantha@flowmeters.co.uk
Drawing upon over 40-years of flowmeter innovation – Titan Enterprises Ltd is a leading manufacturer of high-performance flow measurement solutions, including the Atrato® & Metraflow® ultrasonic flowmeters, Oval Gear flowmeters, low flow Turbine flow meters and a flow instrument range. Titan’s company philosophy of “pushing the envelope by trying to do things a little different and better” has resulted in sales of over 2 million flowmeters and components into 50 countries worldwide and a repeat purchase percentage of 95%. All flowmeters produced by Titan Enterprises are designed and manufactured to ISO 9001 and calibrated to an uncertainty of ±0.25%.
