Abstract
This paper describes how to directly and accurately measure liquid volume in a deformed tank which has gas-leaking pinholes, whose attitude changes and walls vibrate, and in which liquid sloshes: The proposed method differs from the conventional methods that use level meters and makes the measurement possible with out setting level detecting devices such as a float in the tank. The method makes use of the Boyle's law, and the measurement procedure is as follows: (a) first, we determine the volume of gas in the tank by measuring gage pressure increased by compressing the volume in the tank, and (b) next, we find the volume of liquid by subtracting the volume of gas from the capacity of the tank.
This yields that one standard measurement system can be applied to a variety of tanks with a certain range of volume capacities, whereas the conventional methods using level meters are required to design and manufacture different detecting devices depending on shapes of the tanks. Thus, the proposed method can be effectively applied to accurate measurement of amount of fuel in an automobile tank.
Here, we focus our discussion only to measure fuel in the aotomobile tank, but this method can be generally applied to measure volume of liquid, solid and powder in a tank. Principle of measurement and procedure how to design instrument system based on the proposed measurement method is described. Validity of the proposed method was examined by experiments.
