Joe_WaZoo
Lifetime Supporting Member
Hello,
I need a little help or guidance from you level control gurus.
My customer has a horizontally mounted tank that is 144 inches long and 64 inches in diameter. The ends are flat. The customer would like to know the daily usage of the liquid in the tank via a measurement in the morning and another at the end of the day. They use a gravity feed system out of the tank and on some days they believe that they use only 10 gallons of liquid and other days they may use upwards of 100+ gallons. The use of measurement today is a long yard stick. They use that plus a look-up table to give the estimated tank volume.
We have used an ultrasonic sensor to measure the contents from the top of the tank looking down at the liquid, and we get pretty close to the volume, +/- 20 gallons depending on the changes in the analog output of the sensor. The customer has a linearization sheet of 500+ points of volume reference, and we can only linerize upto 100 points from our hardware. For example, we are talking about in the analog sensor output of 9.768mA to 9.695mA, this corresponds to 1294 gallons to 1308 gallons respectfully.
The customer wants accuracy of up to 1 gallon changes in this tank measurement. I say that is impossible given it is a horizontally mounted tank and that our sensor can not detect those extreme small changes.
What solutions would you recommend for this sensing application?
Thanks,
Joe_WaZoo
P.S. After all my internet research, I cringed at the sight of horizontally mounted tanks.
I need a little help or guidance from you level control gurus.
My customer has a horizontally mounted tank that is 144 inches long and 64 inches in diameter. The ends are flat. The customer would like to know the daily usage of the liquid in the tank via a measurement in the morning and another at the end of the day. They use a gravity feed system out of the tank and on some days they believe that they use only 10 gallons of liquid and other days they may use upwards of 100+ gallons. The use of measurement today is a long yard stick. They use that plus a look-up table to give the estimated tank volume.
We have used an ultrasonic sensor to measure the contents from the top of the tank looking down at the liquid, and we get pretty close to the volume, +/- 20 gallons depending on the changes in the analog output of the sensor. The customer has a linearization sheet of 500+ points of volume reference, and we can only linerize upto 100 points from our hardware. For example, we are talking about in the analog sensor output of 9.768mA to 9.695mA, this corresponds to 1294 gallons to 1308 gallons respectfully.
The customer wants accuracy of up to 1 gallon changes in this tank measurement. I say that is impossible given it is a horizontally mounted tank and that our sensor can not detect those extreme small changes.
What solutions would you recommend for this sensing application?
Thanks,
Joe_WaZoo
P.S. After all my internet research, I cringed at the sight of horizontally mounted tanks.