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Over 100 attendees took part in a recent webinar that highlighted why density is such a vital aspect of flow measurement.
“I think that we got this level of interest because of the wide importance of the topic to industry, across a wide range of sectors,” says Principal Consultant, Dr Norman Glen, who ran the webinar. “We got participation from academia, oil producers and manufacturers of instrumentation from around the world.”
“It’s amazing how many end-users don’t appreciate the importance of density as they generally deal with volume measurements,” says Norman. “I explained that in many process applications density is used for process control and product quality assessment and that accurate density measurement is vital throughout the process industry. I presented the work NEL has done on calibrating densitometers at operating conditions and why this is so important.”
The webinar also covered the main approaches to on-line and off-line density measurement (including the advantages and disadvantages of each approach). It looked at density measurement standards and elaborated on NEL’s work to improve density measurement.
“The webinar generated a wide range of questions,” Norman adds, “including one which highlighted the importance of this issue. One of the webinar participants asked: “Are there any flow measurement applications where accurate density measurements are not required?” My answer was “very few!””
Norman also highlighted the limitations of the calculations in the American Petroleum Institute’s Manual of Petroleum Measurement Standards, Chapter 11. There was a lot of interest in this aspect of the webinar and Norman is now getting in touch with relevant parties to look into the potential of addressing the issues raised.
