Design optimization of turbine flow meter in ice maker water supply to improve flow measurement performance

Journal article, 2026

This paper aims to improve the flow measurement performance of a turbine flow meter used in a refrigerator ice maker, especially under low-pressure conditions, where nonlinear characteristics lead to diminished measurement accuracy. Accordingly, we associate defects in spherical-ice quality with metering errors caused by the lowpressure K-factor nonlinearity of the tangential-type turbine flow meter. To this end, an experimental calibration system for the flow meter was designed and constructed, and the reliability of its experimental data was verified using the flow calibration apparatus provided by the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS). Based on this experimental system, a response surface for finding the optimal impeller design of the turbine flow meter was developed using the Design of Experiments (DOE) methodology. To minimize the nonlinear region of the K-factor under low-pressure conditions and the standard deviation of the K-factor under high-pressure conditions, the transition location between the nonlinear and linear regions of the K-factor and its standard error in the linear region were set as the objective functions for the optimal design process. The improvement in performance of the optimized impeller design was experimentally verified by evaluating water supply prediction errors and these objective functions. For quantitative and qualitative analyses of the improvement factors, fluidstructure interaction (FSI) numerical simulations were conducted by employing 6-degree of freedom (6-DOF) and dynamic mesh deformation techniques. The numerical model was validated through quantitative comparison with measured data, while flow visualization was used to assess qualitative similarity of flow features. The detailed analysis based on the numerical results revealed the physical mechanism causing the observed improvements in terms of torque variation and fluid flow energy driving the rotation of the turbine impeller. The proposed experimental framework, complemented by numerical analysis, is applicable to other turbine meter designs.