Method and apparatus for measuring the flow rate of a shielding gas mixture

Abstract

The disclosure relates to a sensor apparatus and a method for measuring the flow rate of a shielding gas in a welding apparatus. The sensor apparatus comprises at least one inlet and at least one outlet in fluid connection with one or more bypass channels and with one or more sensor channels, and at least one input hose and one output hose. The apparatus also comprises one or more thermal mass flow sensors connected to the one or more sensor channels, and a control unit configured to retrieve sensor responses from the one or more thermal mass flow sensors and to determine the flow rate of the shielding gas through the sensor apparatus based on the retrieved sensor response and calibration data, wherein the calibration data comprises one or more characteristic curves comprising gas flow values and sensor response values. The control unit is configured to retrieve from a memory unit: the composition of the shielding gas; the number of active thermodynamic degrees of freedom which the molecules of each gas component in the shielding gas possess at the retrieved shielding gas temperature; a characteristic curve for each gas component separately, which consists of sensor response data as a function of gas flow rate, measured in a calibration experiment conducted with a pure gas consisting only of that gas component. The control unit is configured to calculate a new, mixture-specific characteristic curve for the gas mixture as a weighted average of the pure-gas characteristic curves, wherein the weight assigned to each value on a pure-gas characteristic curve is a product of the concentration percentage of that gas component in the shielding gas mixture and the number of active thermodynamic degrees of freedom which the molecules of that gas component possess at the retrieved shielding gas temperature; and to use the mixture-specific characteristic curve as the characteristic curve for the shielding gas mixture by retrieving from this characteristic curve the calibration gas flow rate which corresponds most closely to the retrieved new sensor response; and to identify this flow rate as the current flow rate of the shielding gas through the sensor apparatus. The sensor apparatus also comprises a display unit configured to display the determined flow rate of the shielding gas to a user and/or a memory unit for storing the determined flow rate of the shielding gas.