Abstract

Los Pelambres (MLP) mIne is located at the IV Region of Chile, semiarid region, where water resources plays a key role as it is a scarce resource and vital for the sustainability of human life, animals and ecosystem. Conventional flow meters installed in pipes may suffer disruptions or failures due to corrosion, fouling, presence of elements in the water such as acids, salts and suspended solids. When the flow of the pipes is measured it is important to know the inner diameter, however it is not always possible to know the real value due to scale, fouling, corrosion, etc. Here we present a novel methodology to solve this problem that consist in measure the flow through a method that does not consider the area inside the pipes, the dilution fluorescent tracer method. By other hand, the fluid velocity is determined by transit time method of radioactive tracer. With the flow rate and velocity, the equivalent area is determined and thus the equivalent pipe diameter too.