B1.2 - Capacitive Fill-Level Measurement Using Configurable Electrodes for Adaptivity
- Event
- AMA Conferences 2017
2017-05-30 - 2017-06-01
Nürnberg, Germany - Band
- Proceedings Sensor 2017
- Chapter
- B1 - Impedance Spectroscopy
- Author(s)
- C. Kandlbinder, T. Sporer, T. Siegel, P. Mößle, A. Fischerauer, T. Zürl, G. Fischerauer - University of Bayreuth (Germany)
- Pages
- 161 - 165
- DOI
- 10.5162/sensor2017/B1.2
- ISBN
- 978-3-9816876-4-4
- Price
- free
Abstract
The observation of fluids and their properties is a frequent task in the field of process engineering. As capacitive measurement techniques can well distinguish between higher-permittivity liquids such as water on the one hand and gases such as air on the other hand, they are well suited to determine liquid/gas distributions. One such application is the contactless measurement of water fill level in a pipe. We designed, implemented and tested a capacitive measurement system for this application. It consists of electrodes distributed along the pipe circumference which can be combined electronically to form smaller or larger “synthetic electrodes”. By measuring the capacitances between the electrodes, one obtains information about the water/gas distribution inside the pipe with a spatial resolution depending on the size of the configurable electrodes. Thus, it becomes possible to quickly obtain coarse fill-level information with larger electrodes and then refine the spatial resolution in a region of interest with a small-electrode configuration (which incurs longer measurement times). The system was successfully tested on a test bench with a pipe inside of which the liquid could be made to slosh by axial movements.