LAUSR

Abstract Performance of an ultrasonic cross-correlation flow measurement instrument may be significantly affected by turbulence at the location of the ultrasonic sensors. In this paper, a new method of generating Synthetic Turbulence is presented, to provide an effective tool for creating a variety of turbulent fields, which can be used to model and analyze instrument performance under different flow conditions. In the proposed method, a turbulent field is presented as a Fourier time-series in each point in space. Turbulence structures are defined by a spatial distribution of phase functions for each harmonic. Principles of designing a phase function to achieve the desirable distribution of turbulence scales, and two-point correlations, are outlined by considering the example of Uniform Isotropic Turbulence. One application of this method, presented in this work, is the mathematical modeling of ultrasonic cross-correlation flow measurement. Results predicted by the proposed mathematical model show good agreement with experimental data.