Capacitive Flow Meter Realtime Processing Using Cross Correlation HDL Design Methodology and Performance
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Accurate low cost flow rate measurements of multiphase varying rate flows would be beneficial to the oil and gas industries in Saskatchewan. This thesis provides a design methodology, implementation and analysis of the performance characteristics for data processing in a low cost real-time flow-rate meter using embedded hardware and cross-correlation. While pure serial and pure parallel implementations are possible, this is not the most efficient solution. A combination of these two methods combined with pipelining was implemented as the most efficient HDL to be compared to a software solution. This implementation balanced the hardware between minimum silicon and maximum throughput in an efficient manner. The results of the comparison indicate that the hardware solution performs at a significantly greater level than the software equivalent. Additional optimizations of both hardware and software could change this ratio to some extent; however the performance ratio should remain strongly in favor of the hardware solution in terms of performance.