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.”