Process | Instrument Suitability
On a fundamental level, pressure is universal. Regardless of the fluid in question; liquid or gas, hot or cold, corrosive or inert, pressure is nothing more than the amount of force exerted by that fluid over a unit area: P = F/A
It should come as no surprise, then, that the common mechanical sensing elements for measuring pressure (bellows, diaphragm, bourdon tube, etc.) are equally applicable to all fluid pressure measurement applications, at least in principle.
It is normally a matter of proper material selection and element strength (material thickness) to make a pressure instrument suitable for any range of process fluids.
Fill fluids used in pressure instruments – whether it be the dielectric liquid inside a differential capacitance sensor, the fill liquid of a remote or chemical seal system, or liquid used to fill a vertical section of impulse tubing – must be chosen so as to not adversely react with or contaminate the process.
Pure oxygen processes require that no system component have traces of hydrocarbon fluids present. While oxygen itself is not explosive, it greatly accelerates the combustion and explosive potential of any flammable substance.
Therefore, a pressure gauge calibrated using oil as the working fluid in a deadweight tester would definitely not be suitable for pure oxygen service!
The same may be said for a DP transmitter with a hydrocarbon-based fill inside its pressure-sensing capsule. (Although this fluid would not normally contact pure oxygen in the process, it could if the isolating diaphragm inside the transmitter were to ever leak.).
Pharmaceutical, medical, and food manufacturing processes require strict purity and the ability to disinfect all elements in the process system at will. Stagnant lines are not allowed in such processes, as microbe cultures may flourish in such “dead end” piping.
Remote seals are very helpful in overcoming this problem, but the fill fluids used in remote systems must be chosen such that a leak in the isolating diaphragm will not contaminate the process.
Manometers, of course, are rather limited in their application, as their operation depends on direct contact between process fluid and manometer liquid.
In the early days of industrial instrumentation, liquid mercury was a very common medium for process manometers, and it was not unusual to see a mercury manometer used in direct contact with a process fluid such as oil or water to provide pressure indication:
Thankfully, those days are gone. Mercury (chemical symbol “Hg”) is a toxic metal and therefore hazardous to work with. Calibration of these manometers was also challenging due to the column height of the process liquid in the impulse line and the range tube.
When the process fluid is a gas, the difference in mercury column height directly translates to sensed pressure by the hydrostatic pressure formula P = ρgh or P = γh.
When the process fluid is a liquid, though, the shifting of mercury columns also creates a change in height of the process liquid column, which means the indicated pressure is a function of the height difference (h) and the difference in density between the process liquid and mercury.
Consequently, the indications provided by mercury manometers in liquid pressure applications were subject to correction according to process liquid density.