Search

The flow head of an orifice-type capacitive flow sensor for a conducting liquid consists of a vertically mounted metallic orifice plate in a horizontal pipeline made of insulating material and a rigidly grounded metallic ring or sensing ring placed surrounding the pipeline at a small distance from the orifice plate where the capacitance between the orifice plate and the sensing ring follows a linear relationship with flow rate as reported in the literature. In this paper, a further study on the effect of position of the sensing ring on the sensor capacitance has been carried out along with the modification of the simple parallel plate capacitance principle described in the earlier work by the real disk-type capacitance principle. From this paper, it has been observed that for any position of the sensing ring near the orifice plate, the sensor capacitance decreases linearly with the increase of flow rate and follows the modified capacitance principle similarly as that observed in earlier work. It has also been observed that the sensing ring distance-sensor capacitance product increases almost linearly with the increase of sensing ring distance. From the experimental study of the proposed orifice type capacitive flow sensors installed on two different pipelines, the said modified theory of the sensor appears to be verified in the present paper where the experimental results are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A non-contact capacitance type liquid-level transducer for a conducting liquid consists of a short circuited non-inductive coil wound on a uniform cylinder made of insulating material, such as glass, PVC, nylon, and teflon. The cylinder is connected with a storage tank through a metallic connector and the capacitance between upper short circuited end of the coil and metallic connector varies linearly with liquid level measured from datum level. The capacitance at datum level depends on atmospheric condition and the fringe effect of other conductors. So, the transducers require frequent recalibration depending on atmospheric and environmental conditions. In the present paper, this non-contact capacitive sensor has been further modified in order to minimize this defect of non-contact capacitive sensor. Furthermore, all the conventional capacitance type-level sensors are associated with a perpendicular plate capacitance between liquid and electrode, which varies with the length of the electrode. In this paper, the effect of this perpendicular capacitor on liquid level measured has been studied and its effect is minimized. The proposed modified transducer has been designed and developed and its theory of operation has been derived. The performance of the developed transducer has been experimentally studied and the experimental results are reported in the paper. A good linear performance characteristic of the transducer with very minimum parasitic capacitance effect has been observed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]