About METERdat About Us History of Chart Recorders Contact Us		The Orifice Meter Definition - "An inferential meter for measuring flow in a pipeline and consisting of a Primary Element and Secondary Element."... " in order to accurately measure gas" In the early days of commercial natural gas distribution came the demand for methods and devices to measure, record and charge for the commodity. Positive displacement meters were developed and experienced advancement in 1902 when a circular chart recording device was patented by GX Wittmer (#716973) to record both the volume movements of a positive displacement meter and the pressure of the gas to correct the volumes. The advancements continued into the next decade when in 1916, H.P.Westcott patented a gas measuring apparatus that charted the pressure and differential pressure of gas passing through an orifice plate ( Venturi ). The original Westcott appartus utilized a stripchart recorder, but these innovations would eventually be combined to establish the basis for the modern orifice meter. Despite the proven utility, reliability and outright popularity of orifice measurement, the inherent limitation is the charts only display a graph of instantaneous flow rate variables. Integrated values were still needed to calculate the accumulated volumes. Inventors persued the challenge with many interesting and usually complex mechanical devices to integrate the flow sensors at the field meter. Some examples of these earlier integrators found on the USTPO site are: 2159882 May 23 1939. MM Borden - Integrator 3322339 May 30, 1967, CB Nolte - Flow Meter Integrator None of the field integrating devices became commonly used or accepted in the rigours of oil field use. The more successful developments came in the Desktop integrators that allowed manual retracing of the charts to integrate the flow and pressure values over time. US patent "#3980865, Sept14, 1976. Messer et al.- Electronic Integrator for gas volume calculations" is similar to the integrators commonly used today. The circular chart recorder and desktop chart integrator combination would become the global standard for gas measurement in the hydrocarbon producing and processing industries. Modern computing technologies helped to automate the chart integration, volume calculations, and data handling processes in the office. In the field, the instrumentation developments abandon the chart recorders to replace them with a dazzling array of more costly and power consuming electronic systems that lack in the color graphical display and hard copy records created by the mechanical recorders. METERdat finally creates the ultimately simple flow integration field solution with the innovative synergy of pen sensing technology in conventional circular chart recorders. Sounder Technologies wishes to acknowledge all of the contributors to the development of orifice measurement that could not be mentioned in this brief flash back in the history of chart recorder developments.