While most people avoid math as often as possible at work, some industries require constant recalculation based on changing conditions.
If you're in an industry dealing with liquids or gases, you need to calculate flow rate constantly. With the help of our calculator, flow rate conversions can be tackled easily.
Follow along with this article to get an overview of what volume flow rate is and how it applies to our lives.
If, instead, you were looking for a mass flow rate calculator, click here.
Finding a flow rate converter you can trust will allow you to be able to get through your work quickly and efficiently.
If conditions change, or you need more precise measurements, you'll be able to make the changes in a few seconds as opposed to having to do the math on your own.
With this tool in your arseanal, you can say goodbye to those pesky equations and hello to instant, accurate conversions.
When you hear the term flow rate or volume flow rate, it might sound abstract but it's connected to everything from plumbing to our circulatory system.
The definition of flow rate is fairly simple, being the amount or volume of fluid that passes through a defined area in a period of time.
Flow rate "Q" equals "v" or volume divided by "t" time.
To make this measurement, you have to have at least two of these measurements already. If you only have flow rate and time, you can find the volume.
If you have time and flow rate, you can start to figure out the volume.
It's most likely that you'll have access to volume and time before you have the result of flow rate.
Did you know that flow rate is calculated to know whether someone is in good health or not?
A heart pumps out the volume of a can of seltzer approximately every four seconds.
If you've got low blood pressure, it can be a problem of flow among other things.
Often, this number is calculated in cubic meters per second, which makes the number seem profoundly small.
However, given that a cubic meter is quite large for a liquid, the looks of the number can be deceiving.
Many people will choose to use smaller or alternative units to calculate flow rate in a more concrete way.
For laboratory conditions, you'll need a smaller number than something relevant to thousands of cans of soda.
In these cases, a flow rate converter can be a handy tool to use.
There is actually an alternative to this standard flow rate formula.
It's pretty common for flow rate to be understood via the cross-section of the theoretical pipe that it runs through.
Knowing the cross-sectional area of fluid, "A", and the width of the fluid "d" allows us to understand it differently.
Multiplying that cross section "A" by a fraction of "d" over time ("t") can express your desired flow rate ("Q").
The pipe doesn't have to be cylindrical for this to work. You could find a width small enough so that the shape is relative to the rest of the pipe.
The volume could be represented by the area more or less, multiplied by that small width. But as the distance is going to be divided by time, the width can be quite small.
This would result in a fast speed. When the length of the volume is divided by the time it took to go through the length, you get the speed of the fluid.
This new formula is sometimes more useful than the original definition because your area is going to be easier to determine.
Most pipes are cylindrical so you should be able to use the cylinder formula of Pi times your radius, squared.
If you know anything about the durability of liquids, you know that they're nearly impossible to compress.
You can pour a gallon of milk into a tall and skinny gallon container or into a short and squat gallon container.
However, you'll never be able to get that gallon into a half-gallon container.
It's not as if it's completely impossible to compress liquids, but it would take massive amounts of pressure to make any noticeable difference in volume.
And under those kinds of circumstances, most nearby elements would be struggling with the compression.
Gases are easier to compress than liquid because there's much more space between the molecules.
If you neglect the amount of compression that a gas is experiencing, you could make huge errors in calculation.
Liquid flowing through a pipe at full volume takes the shape of a pipe, but a gas would not.
The behavior of liquids is easy to predict, as it must maintain the shape of the pipe it's flowing through but the behavior of gases is a little more challenging.
Liquids are nearly impossible to compress, which makes their behaviour very predictable.
When you're calculating flow rate, gases are going to be more complex than liquids due to the amount of space between molecules.