Imagine you are cruising in your car.

Then you take a quick glance at the fuel gauge and realise the needle is pointing to E.
What do you do? You will quickly make your way to the nearest petrol kiosk and start pumping
your car with oil
If you look closely, while refueling your car, you will see that there is a meter running.
Other than seeing your money fly away, you will see the amount of oil, measured in litres, that is
being transferred to your car.
So this is what happens when you are on land, now what about in the sea?
When you are in the sea, there is no such thing as a petrol kiosk or station.
What happens when your ship is low on fuel is that, there will be another ship called the supply
ship that will come along next to you, connect a long hose to you and start pumping oil.
However the problem is that during this refueling process, there is no way of knowing how much
oil is being transferred unlike in the petrol station where you have a meter that tells you how
much oil is being pumped
So how do they determine the amount of oil being transferred?
Ladies and gentlemen, all these while we have been relying on a conventional and primitive
method called manual gauging.
At any point of time during the refueling process, they will take a tape attached to piece of
deadweight and drop it down all the way down the tank. From there you will get the depth of the
oil and then proceed doing tedious calculation taking into account the density, temperature and
tank geometry of the tank.
This will only get you a rough estimate of the amount of oil present or that has been transferred.
You might think that it is only a little bit inaccurate however you have to realise that in ships, we
are dealing with hundreds and thousands of tonnes of oil,
Hence in reality this inaccuracy has a much greater impact than you actually think
Now, we have a PROBLEM. An ACCURACY PROBLEM that arises from usage of conventional
methods.
Because of the accuracy problem, supply ships start to take advantage and start to short
change the amount of fuel.
It is almost like daylight roberry! And I now nobody likes being cheated or short changed
[STORY]
A very common scheme that supply ships use to maximise their profit is that during the transfer
of oil, they blow air into the oil, making it froth.
This is what we call the cuppocino effect
When there is froth in the tank and we measure using the conventional method, you can see
that there is a huge difference.
The dipstick/diptape will show you the reading from the base of the tank to the top of the froth
instead of from the base of the tank to the surface of the oil
So you think that you have this much of oil however you only have this much.
Then, how are we gonna solve these problems?
The answer is MASS FLOW METERS!

Today I am going to introduce to you all this revolutionary product, it is the product the entire
shipping industry has been waiting for because it will set a new standard and become the new
standard.
The mass flow meter is a simple add on product. It is not going to change the ship refuelling
process. Instead it is going to complement the ship refuelling process.
As I have mentioned before, to refuel the ship, you just need to connect a large hose between
the 2 ships, the supply ship, and the low on fuel ship and start pumping oil but the problem is
measuring the amount of oil that is being transferred.
By installing this product in between the 2 ships and letting it act like a middleman during the
refuelling process, the mass flow meter will instantly give us the amount of oil being transferred.

Mass flow meters takes advantage of a force called the coriolis force.
The moment I mentioned coriolis force I can see this same facial expression on all your faces.
Well let's make things easier. Lets imagine that you want to get across a river. You will take a
boat and just row straight so that you can get there at the fastest time possible right. Thats your
intended path. However as you keep rowing, you realise that instead of going straight, your path
becomes distorted, it becomes curved, this is due to the presence of a current, an external
force, that pushes you downstream, keeping you away from your intended straight path.
Now, the mass flow meter applies the same concept of an external force acting on an object that
is intending to move straight but instead of it being a current, it is a force called the coriolis
force.
In the mass flow meter, there are 2 tubes.
These 2 tubes will vibrate about an axis as such when there is no oil flowing through.
However, when oil starts to flow through, the 2 tubes will vibrate differently.
Just like how your boats path in the river was distorted or curved, the vibration of the tubes will
also become distorted or curved.
[CLICK]In the mass flow meters, we have precision-sensors that register the time lag of the
distorted vibration.
Once we know the value of the time lag, we can get an accurate reading of the amount of oil
transferred because the time lag is proportional to the mass flow.
Implementing mass flow meters will increase the error in accuracy from 0.5% to 0.1%.
This is an increase in accuracy by 80%.
This increase will lead to shipping companies becoming more economically efficient as now the
amount of oil they ordered will be the amount of oil they get.
The integrity during ship refueling process will be protected because money making schemes
such as the cappuccino effect will not work because mass flow meters will not take into account
the froth, as the name suggests, it will only measure the mass of oil.

topic: mass flow meter

device that measures mass flow rate of a fluid traveling through a tube
ships have always been measuring oil through conventional method, using a
dipstick/tape followed by calculations
using this device, it will be like automated, accurate and simple way of measuring
oil just like refueling your car at a petrol station where there is a meter and it
measures the amount of fuel you just pumped
talk about:
-principle (how the device works)
coriolis effect (large scale)
The Coriolis flow meters work on a basic principle of Coriolis Effect or 'Force' which
is essentially a veering or deflection of a moving object when viewed from a rotating
reference frame. In the Northern Hemisphere a moving object will appear to deflect to
the right (facing the direction of motion) and vice versa in the Southern
Hemisphere.
Note that Coriolis force is actually not a force but since the objects tend to veer to
the left or right of its path, it is assumed that a force has acted upon it to cause this
deflection because of the Earth's movement underneath it.
coriolis effect (small scale)
If the same jet of water was now enclosed in a measuring tube rotating around a
fixed point with its axis perpendicular to the direction of flow of water; the
measuring tube would appear to twist/deform due to the change in angular velocity
from the Coriolis Effect.
However, it's not practical to make the tube rotate so instead, the tube is oscillated
electromagnetically causing it to vibrate achieving the same effect as if the tube
was rotating.
This twisting/deformation of the tube results in a phase difference (time lag) which
is registered by use of special sensors and thus form the basis of the mass flow
measuring in the system.
-benefits
cappucino effect can be eliminated
-cost
-implementation (1 day which includes hot work(welding))
-limitation
me: mechanical engineer trying to persuade ship owners to use this product
audience: ship owners, ship brokers, investors