Liquid Flow Meter by Fiber-Optic Sensing of Heat Propagation

Monitoring fluid flow rates is imperative for a variety of industries including biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, the food industry, and the oil and gas industries. We propose a flow meter that, unlike turbine or pressure-based sensors, is not flow intrusive, requires zero maintenance, has low risk of clogging, and is compatible with harsh conditions. Using optical fiber sensing, we monitor the temperature distribution along a fluid conduit. Pulsed heat injection locally elevates the fluid's temperature, and from the propagation velocity of the heat downstream, the fluid's velocity is determined. The method is experimentally validated for water and ethanol using optical frequency-domain reflectometry (OFDR) with millimetric spatial resolution over a 1.2 m-long conduit. Results demonstrate that such sensing yields accurate data with a linear response. By changing the optical fiber interrogation to time-domain distributed sensing approaches, the proposed technique can be scaled to cover sensing ranges of several tens of kilometers. On the other extreme, miniaturization for instance by using integrated optical waveguides could potentially bring this flow monitoring technique to microfluidic systems or open future avenues for novel "lab-in-a-fiber" technologies with biomedical applications.