Flow Meter Calibration

BLTI is spearheading a repair, maintenance, and calibration project for flow meters that service the greater Houston metropolitan area. BLTI is capable of servicing, repairing, and calibrating electromagnetic, venturi, open channel, weir, flume, and ultrasonic flow meters.

Why verify the accuracy of a flowmeter?

The value of water flowing annually in the water distribution system for a major population center is roughly worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year! Knowing the accurate flow in any distributed segment will not only confirm that revenue metering is accurate but help to identify losses due to leakage.

Over time, flow meters have a tendency to drift due to aging, internal surface deposits, contamination, external influence like temperature, pressure vibrations, etc. These potential issues can result in performance changes in the flow meter and could provide inaccurate measurements.

For calibration, flow meters are removed from the process and shipped to the original manufacturer's calibration factory. Putting a meter out of service for calibration can result in downtime or a complete shutdown. This is why onsite verification is a much more efficient way of checking the accuracy of meters. Verification is also known as a "dry calibration" confirms a flow meter satisfies certain technical requirements of functionality as defined by the manufacturer. It is a detailed functional test to confirm the sensor and/or transmitter's stability and produces a qualitative outcome. The onsite verification results provide insight on the current status of the flow meters functionality, and where the outcome is a qualitative assessment report based on a pass-fail criterion such as process impacts, drift, or hardware failures.

BLTI Qualifications

BLTI technicians are trained and certified to service, repair, replace and perform dry calibrations on multiple brands of flow meters. Onsite verifications are performed without taking the flow meter out of service and disrupting the flow. During these verifications, a complete check on the accuracy and sensitivity of the transmitter is performed, including confirming that no drift on initial factory calibration settings has occurred.