New Flow Calibration Facilities Are World’s Best

Endress+Hauser’s new full-scale calibration rig in Greenwood, Ind., is the first major flow calibration facility built in North America in a generation. Combined with the new flow calibration facility Endress+Hauser has just opened in La Porte, Texas, and with the home calibration facility in Reinach, Switzerland, and others, Endress+Hauser says it intends to provide a uniformly high standard of measuring quality, worldwide.

The new calibration facility in Greenwood produces measurements that deviate no more than ±0.015% from the reference value—equivalent to about the contents of one champagne glass in 265 gallons of water. In all, 30 influencing variables were taken into account in order to achieve the excellent performance of this facility.

The normal calibration test for magnetic flowmeters is a run against a “Coriolis tower” made up of multiple Endress+Hauser Coriolis mass flowmeters. At regular intervals, the tower itself is calibrated against a gravimetric flow tank, which itself is calibrated against known weights several times a year. “This investment enables the flowmeters we manufacture in Greenwood to be calibrated accurately,” explains Peter Blaser, general manager of E+H’s Greenwood flow manufacturing facility. “This represents the very best in the international league.”

Coriolis mass flowmeters can be calibrated accurately to the specified figure of ±0.05%, Blaser says. The facility can also calibrate magnetic flowmeters up to 48 in. diameter at up to 33 ft per sec velocity (10 meters per sec). Vortex shedding flowmeters also are calibrated in Greenwood.

E+H’s Gulf Coast Calibration and Service Center provides flow, pressure, temperature and wet chemistry sensor calibration service, either in-house or on-site. “We expect to work on most manufacturers’ instruments,” says Jerry Spindler, product group manager, “as well as doing maintenance training in our new state-of-the-art training facility, which includes a digital communications lab.”

Spindler says the Gulf Coast facility will handle line sizes up to 4 in., with accuracies of 0.1% for Coriolis meters, 0.20% for magmeters, and 0.75% of rate for vortex flowmeters. Higher line sizes or higher accuracy calibrations can be done at the Greenwood facility. A typical production calibration run in Greenwood requires about 15 to 20 minutes to complete.

Water is pumped from three neoprene rubber-lined underground tanks through a UV sterilization system that removes bacterial and algae growth. When a calibration run is required, pumps shunt the water through the Coriolis meter tower to the appropriate meter run. The entire system is automated. Even the self-calibration system is automated and operates at night, so as not to disturb production.

E+H’s calibration facilities are accredited by widely different national authorities, including SAS, A2LA and CNAS in accordance with ISO/IEC17025. In addition, all test resources are seamlessly traceable back to national standards, such as NIST, and are subject to periodic inspection by national standard authorities.

The new E+H calibration facilities are specifically designed to interface with Endress+Hauser’s Life Cycle Management system, W@M. Available in two versions, the web-based W@M Portal or the PC-based W@M Enterprise, this system provides detailed data for asset management of an end user’s installed base of E+H’s products.

W@M provides information for any installed E+H product, including complete spare parts lists, including drawings that are specific to that product; product availability information; order code and configuration details; serial numbers and the customer’s assigned instrument tags; original calibration and 3.1b certificates; operating manuals, safety instructions, and information on service and repair, including service reports.

Calibration and repair information from the Greenwood or Gulf Coast facilities is entered directly into W@M, providing a “live data” look at the installed data base at any time in the product’s lifecycle.

For more information on calibration, service or W@M, visit www.us.endress.com or call 888-ENDRESS.