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Dropper flow measurement prototype

Olivier Hüsser

Keywords

Metrology, drop flow measurement, c-mos imager, low cost vision, prototype

Project description

This project deals with the accurate measurement of a liquid flow for a medical dropper. At the moment, droppers either rely on drop counting for measuring the liquid flow and they are inaccurate or they use precise peristaltic pumps and they are expensive. Because the drops falling from a pipe are subject to volume variations, some form of drop volume measurement is required. To perform this task, a vision system is well suited as it satisfies the requirement of a non-invasive measurement.

The goal of this project is to analyze main aspects of a vision unit that performs this task and to build an operational prototype.

Work

Two different configurations were analyzed and two experimental setups were developed. The first setup is devoted to experimental performance evaluation of accuracy. It shows that the effective accuracy can be better than 1%.

Figure 1: Prototype drop flow device

The second setup is in fact a prototype of the size of conventional drop counting devices. In addition to the functions provided by the first setup, this one includes in addition the same optical, illumination and imaging devices as planned for a new device. This prototype demonstrates the feasibility of drop volumetry by imaging and provides the basic information for effective variants and costs.

References