I am wanting to build a device that will detect a viscosity change in a liquid. To keep it simple for now imagine a plastic gasoline container that has half vegetable oil and half water. I want to detect from the outside where this separation happens. The oil/water have been allowed to separate in this situation.
Would the MIKROE Microwave Click give me a voltage output that would change as long as the sensor was pressed against the container?
Would I use a capacitive sensor? A friend has had some luck with a stud finder which uses capacitive sensing but given the stud finders design not intended for this purpose it wasn’t consistent.
I want to purchase a product but need to find out what the best solution would be to start with.
Thanks for your help,
Steve
Capacitive proximity sensors are inexpensive and easily discriminate between oil and water, due to the large difference in dielectric constant). I use them to measure the water level in large plastic storage tanks, with walls about 1/4" thick.
Randomly chosen example https://store.thingibox.com/en/electric … ensor.html
That is, estimate the water level line from outside the tank, through the plastic wall, by running the sensor tip up and down.
Thank you for the info jremington. I have a capacitive sensor that I tried and it does detect the liquid line. The sensor also has a button to set its detection level so I tried calibrating it to Dawn dishsoap and another bottle with rubbing alcohol. It was kind of working but I couldn’t get perfect results. I’m thinking I need a capacitive sensor that has a variable voltage out then I can just monitor/display that voltage and determine the density based on the numbers. I’ll have to do some testing with different viscosities to get a dataset for sure.
The proximity sensor method of detection is based on dielectric constant, not viscosity or density.
A fairly good discussion of how the sensors actually work can be found here: https://robu.in/capacitive-proximity-se … principle/