Controlled Fluid Flow Without Controlling Pump Through Arduino

Abstract

Various industries like chemical, energy, nuclear, process, manufacturing, healthcare, and agriculture require the flow rate to be controlled. It may be constant, steady state, or between the specific upper and lower range. This article explained the development of a cost-effective fluid flow control system using an Arduino microcontroller. The direct use of the pump is not good because there are a lot of challenges (corrosion, power fluctuations, pressure leak) with the pump, and with time as it gets old, the chances of getting good, desired flow from it are not possible. We achieved the controlled flow rate (volume rate and mass rate) in a very precise and cost-effective manner because the flow corresponding to the height is steadier and more constant than getting steady flow from the pump. Hence, our solution is that we don’t get direct flow from the pump but from tank B. Tank B must be very carefully designed (especially its height and cross section) to get the desired value of the flow rate from it. As per Bernoulli’s theorem, the flow velocity has a direct relation with the height. We just used the pump to refill tank B up to the desired level. In this case, the flow rate only varies when there is a larger change in the head of the tank from which it is coming (it is tank B in our case). The pump automatically becomes ON when the flow rate drops below 2 and fills tank B again to the height which corresponds to the flow rate 3, and when the flow rate becomes 3, the pump becomes OFF automatically. The process is repeated until the desired process is completed. After completion, the valve from tank B can be closed. The hardware integrations, software programming logic, and physical experimental setup are discussed.

Received: 23 March 2024 | Revised: 23 May 2024 | Accepted: 12 June 2024

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data available on request from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Author Contribution Statement

Shamsher Ali: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration; Syed Muhammad Daniyal Gillani: Methodology, Investigation, Writing - original draft; Syed Muhammad Zain: Formal analysis, Visualization; Sudais Ahamd Khan: Resources.