Brooks Instrument Blog

Yesterday I covered flow rate and reference conditions and talked about how important (or not) these are to specifying a variable area (VA) flow meter. Today, I’ll finish up my tips by reviewing fluid density and viscosity as well as accuracy.

Fluid: Density and viscosity
We always have questions about the fluid such as gas or liquid.  What are the density and viscosity?  Is it corrosive or opaque?  If it a know fluid such as air, nitrogen, water, etc.  The questions get much easier because the world has defined how these known fluids behave so we can easily determine density and viscosity for common fluids such as air, water, nitrogen, etc.  Which leads to the questions as to why do we need to know fluid density and viscosity?  Fluid density and viscosity are important because these two values allow us to select the right flow meter (meter size).  We call this sizing.  What is behind sizing?  Briefly, performance data has been collected on all of the different meters we offer.  We query the performance data and look for flow meters that fit the supplied process conditions (density and viscosity).  Usually there are many flow meters that fit your conditions.  From there it becomes a matter of preference, available options, price or accuracy.  This leads me to my last topic on VA meters, which is accuracy. Read more…

In yesterday’s blog post, I took you through why we need to know about your normal and maximum operating temperatures and pressures in your application to specify the right variable area (VA) flow meter for your process. Today, we’ll dive into flow rates and reference conditions.

3. Flow rate – minimum, maximum, normal
Of course flow rate is an obvious requirement but it is more complicated than it appears.  The goal is to specify a VA meter where the normal operating flow is in the 60% to 80% of the meter’s range.  Why you ask because a variable area meter is more accurate in the upper part of its range.  I will talk more about accuracy in my next blog post.  Of course a flow meter needs to be chosen that handles the minimum and maximum flows too.  The other component of flow rate is the units.  Read more…

Variable area (VA) flow meters will respond like the canary in the mine when the air quality changes.  If process conditions change there usually is an impact on flow rate.  For example if back pressure changes on gas flows the float/flow will change just as changes in liquid viscosity will have a similar impact to the float/flow.

VA meters reacting to changes in process conditions can be a good or bad thing based on a user’s viewpoint, which brings us back to the real question.  So why do we need so much information to specify the proper VA meter?  I will go through the questions and explain why it is necessary.  The information needed is: Read more…

After posting the blog about Brooks’ history with NASA this morning, I realized that this blog post about our Quantim’s in space must have been mistakenly deleted at some point, so here it is! Enjoy!

Delivering saline solution to a clinic for medical needs … sounds simple enough, right? Not when that clinic is on the International Space Station, the moon or even Mars. Transporting medical fluids that are manufactured on Earth into space is expensive and logistically challenging. NASA Johnson Space Center knew there had to be a way to manufacture medical fluids in space to alleviate the transportation problems and to make spacecraft more self sufficient, so they called on the microgravity science expertise and spaceflight hardware development know-how of Cleveland, OH based NASA Glenn Research Center and ZIN Technologies, Inc.

Read more…

While we were cleaning out our offices a few weeks ago a co-worker of mine handed me a great Norman Rockwell oil painting that we used to have hanging in one of our hallways. It was taken down when we were updating our facility. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. The reason we used to have it hanging up in the walls at Brooks (and the reason I’m going to find it another nice home on our walls) is because in the background of the picture you can see some Brooks Sho-Rate variable area flow meters between the two men on the left. Brooks provided Sho-Rate flow meters to  NASA for some of the first missions into space. Read more…

It’s time for the Chem Show again. For Brooks, it’s nice that this show is right around the corner from our headquarters in Hatfield, PA … just a simple train ride up to New York. I’m looking forward to the Chem Show and if you are going, be sure to stop by our booth, booth #303.

We have a lot of new stuff to share with everyone at the Chem Show this year. We have our new vacuum capacitance manometers, the CMC and XacTorr Series vacuum capacitance manometers. These capacitance diaphragm gauges incorporate industry-leading features to improve measurement reliability, minimize drift, resist diaphragm contamination and minimize thermal effects in vacuum measurement applications. Read more…

I’m really excited to announce the availability of a low flow rate option for our Model MT3809 armored rotameters. The MT3809 variable area flow meter is now capable of accurately measuring flow rates as low as 5 L/h of air and 0.08 L/h of water with this new option. We’ve had customers requesting this new option but the real advantage is that we now have HART communications for a low flow armored flow meter. Read more…

We continue to add more products to our e-commerce website, www.BrooksInstrument.com/Shop. We just added the model 8601 pressure regulator this week. There six different variations of the model 8601 available now in addition to the glass tube variable area flow meters, plastic tube variable area flow meters, and pressure gauges. Read more…