The project's overall objective is to develop a commercially viable sensing system to infer the flow rate and fineness of pulverized coal flows using the dynamic signature from a pipe-mounted accelerometer. The preliminary calibration data for this effort will be obtained using a Coal Flow Test Facility built and operated by our subcontractor, Airflow Sciences Corporation, in support of an EPRI program. Airflow Sciences encountered significant difficulty getting the system up and running, with the final hurdles related to the system controls. These problems were resolved in this reporting period, so that the facility is ready for testing. Shakedown testing with our instrumentation package began late in the reporting period. Preliminary analysis of the resulting data indicates that there are problems with the instrumentation and/or test rig. Even with no flow passing through the test section, a power spectrum of the data shows strong frequency ''lines''. The data should be free of such behaviors, so the instrumentation must be recording behaviors that are unrelated to the flow. This issue must be resolved before calibration data are collected. A preliminary effort to debug the problem through long-distance consultation between Foster-Miller and Airflow Sciences personnel at the end of the reporting period …

Instrumentation difficulties encountered in the previous reporting period were addressed early in this reporting period, resulting in a new instrumentation configuration that appears to be free of the noise issues found previously. This permitted the collection of flow calibration data to begin. The first issues in question are the effects of the type and location of the transducer mount. Data were collected for 15 different transducer positions (upstream and downstream of an elbow in the pipe), with both a stud mount and a magnetic transducer mount, for each of seven combinations of air and coal flow. Analysis of these data shows that the effects of the transducer mount type and location on the resulting dynamics are complicated, and not easily captured in a single analysis. To maximize the practical value of the calibration data, further detailed calibration data will be collected with both the magnetic and stud mounts, but at a single mounting location just downstream of a pipe elbow. This testing will be performed in the Coal Flow Test Facility in the next reporting period. The program progress in this reporting period was sufficient to put us essentially back on schedule.