The Volume Measurement of Air Flowing through a Cross-section with PLC Using Trapezoidal Rule Method

In industrial control systems, flow measurement is a very important issue. It is frequently needed to calculate how much total fluid or gas flows through a cross-section. Flow volume measurement tools use simple sampling or rectangle methods. Actually, flow volume measurement process is an integration process. For this reason, measurement systems using instantaneous sampling technique cause considerably high errors. In order to make more accurate flow measurement, numerical integration methods should be used. Literally, for numerical integration method, Rectangular, Trapezoidal, Simpson, Romberg and Gaussian Quadrature methods are suggested. Among these methods, trapezoidal rule method is quite easy to calculate and is notably more accurate and contains no restrictive conditions. Therefore, it is especially convenient for the portable flow volume measurement systems. In this study, the volume measurement of air which is flowing through a cross-section is achieved by using PLC ladder diagram. The measurements are done using two different approaches. Trapezoidal rule method is proposed to measure the flow sensor signal to minimize measurement errors due to the classical sampling method as a different approach. It is concluded that the trapezoidal rule method is more effective than the classical sampling.