This paper proposes a soft sensing method of least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) using temperature time series for gas flow measurements. A heater unit has been installed on the external wall of a pipeline to generate heat pulses. Dynamic temperature signals have been collected upstream of the heater unit. The temperature time series are the main secondary variables of soft sensing technique for estimating the flow rate. A LS-SVM model is proposed to construct a non-linear relation between the flow rate and temperature time series. To select its inputs, parameters of the measurement system are divided into three categories: blind, invalid and secondary variables. Then the kernel function parameters are optimized to improve estimation accuracy. The experiments have been conducted both in the single-pulse and multiple-pulse heating modes. The results show that estimations are acceptable.

Different temperature sensors show different measurement values when excited by the same dynamic temperature source. Therefore, a method is needed to determine the difference between dynamic temperature measurements. This paper proposes a novelty approach to treating dynamic temperature measurements over a period of time as a temperature time series, and derives the formula for the distance between the measurement values using uniformsampling within the time series analysis. The similarity is defined in terms of distance to measure the difference. The distance measures were studied on the analog measurement datasets. The results show that the discrete Fréchet distance has stronger robustness and higher sensitivity. The two methods have also been applied to an experimental dataset. The experimental results also confirm that the discrete Fréchet distance performs better.