Non-Invasive Ultrasonic Flow Meter - Development Board Suggestions?

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello everyone! This is my first time using the Arduino Forums. I was wondering if you all had any suggestions for a suitable development board for my project. I am apart of a engineering capstone team and we're trying to determine the best development board to use in the prototyping of a non-invasive ultrasonic flow meter.

We are going to design a flow meter similar to that shown below:

600×600 19.4 KB

We were looking at utilizing a Particle Boron LTE which has the following specs (Spec Sheet):

  • Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 SoC
  • ARM Cortex-M4F 32-bit processor @ 64MHz
  • 1MB flash, 256KB RAM
  • IEEE 802.15.4-2006: 250 Kbps
  • Bluetooth 5: 2 Mbps, 1 Mbps, 500 Kbps, 125 Kbps

As for our transducer, we are planning on using two Audiowell 1MHz Ultrasonic Transducers ([Spec Sheet](http://"https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data Sheets/Audiowell PDFs/US0014-001.pdf")) configured to calculate the Transit time of the flow. The development board needs to be able to activate the transducers with enough power to penetrate the wall thickness of a PVC, Steel, and/or Copper pipe wall and have sufficient processing power to calculate the flow rate. Furthermore, we are going to use the cellular and Bluetooth connectivity to relay the flow data to an external server and/or a mobile phone. The flow meter unit will have internal battery and the a port for connecting to an external power supply. We are aiming at designing a unit that can be powered solely by the internal battery for weeks on end while in low-power mode.
Do you all think that the Particle Boron is powerful enough to satisfy these demands? If not, do you all have any suggestions for alternative boards?

Note: we are just starting our journey into the world of Arduino, so any advice would be welcomed.

2

The transducer part is what I would concentrate - getting the sound into the gas, deciding on a path length , avoiding signals going around the pipe surface .
From that and your geometry you can work out the time of flight and how you would take a measurement and how you would interpret it .
Then decide what computing power you need .
You need to think about whether your geometry will account for flow profile , flow noise etc . Start with an oscilloscope .

It may be the case that a lot of the measurement work will be in analog electronics .

3

And make that a storage oscilloscope with a trigger to store trace for future examination.

Paul