Development of the MRI Flow Phantom System Focused on Low Speed Flows in Fluid Machinery

At present, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is one of the noninvasive diagnostic imaging techniques for medical use, has been applied to industrial product inspection. In this study, a hydraulic model test system, called the “flow phantom system,” which can generate steady flow and oscillating flow for time-resolved MRI, was developed to aid optimum design of fluid machinery. Simple flow phantoms are tested under laminar flow or oscillating flow to evaluate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed system. In this article, the test results of double cylindrical pipe flow, elbow pipe flow, cylindrical valve flow, and jet pump flow, which are often seen in fluid machines, are tested using the 2D time-spatial labeling inversion pulse (Time-SLIP) method, which can track a labeled water mass and visualize it using two-dimensional images. MRI-detected flow patterns were compared with particle image velocimetry (PIV) or numerical simulation.