Hot Wire Flow Measurement Principle

While Pitot tubes work well for high flow rates in gasses, and a variety of flow rates in liquids, the technique fails for low air velocities in gasses. To solve this gap in velocity measurement technology, the hot wire and hot film probes were developed.

This technique is fairly straight forward in concept, but much more difficult in operation. The theory is that if you place a resistance wire in the flow of air (or other gas) and heat the wire with a fixed current, the voltage across the wire will indicate the resistance of the wire.

If you know the properties of the wire you can deduce what its temperature is. Knowing this information, you can determine how much heat is being carried away by the moving stream of gas flowing across the wire or film. Simple… maybe.

The difficulty with this is that the density, temperature and actual makeup of the gas flowing affect the heat absorption as well as the flow. This has been handled in a number of ways, but the most straightforward is to use two wires. One in the flow a one out of the flow, and make your measurement based on the difference of these two values.

A second method is to make an assumption that the reading is being made in “standard air” which has a known coefficient of absorption. Using this method the only values that are needed are hot wire value and the temperature of the air prior to the hot wire.

Hot wire probes are extremely fast response devices.