Passive Acoustic Transducer as a Fluid Flow Sensor

Autonomy and minimal disruption are key desirable features for sensors to be deployed in medical, industrial, vehicle and infrastructure monitoring systems. Using a passive structure to transduce the quantity of interest into an acoustic or electromagnetic wave could offer an attractive solution for remote sensing, lifting the requirements of installing active materials, electronics, and power sources in remote, inaccessible, sensitive, or harsh environment locations. Here, we report a simple cavity and ball structure that transduces fluid flow through a pipe into an acoustic signal. A microphone on the outside wall of the pipe records the intensity and arrival rate of the sound pulses generated by collisions between the ball and the cavity walls. Using this approach external measurement of flow is demonstrated with adequate repeatability before any acoustic signal processing. This result is expected to open the way to the implementation of passive, remotely readable sensors for fluid flow and other fluid properties of interest.