DEVELOPMENT OF AN ULTRASONIC SENSOR BASED OIL LEVEL

INDICATOR

ABSTRACT
The quest to save electrical and water resources, we developed an automatic water level
controller with pump switching system for both overhead and underground tanks. This module
monitors and displays level of water in a tank. When water is at the specified lowest level, pump
is automatically turned ON to refill until the tank is filled to its maximum capacity, then pump is
turned OFF thereby saving both inadequate electrical and water resources. The design consist of
Power supply, microcontroller, sensor, display and pump units. Arduino UNO, a microcontroller,
which is commercially available, is replaced with a cost effective, electronically and
environmentally rugged assemblage from available cheap components. The 20kHz ultrasonic
distance sensor, remotely senses level of water by measuring length of emptiness or fullness of the
tank from recorded time of arrival of echo from water surface. This length is interpreted and
displayed by programme based microprocessor in percentage (%) of the capacity on Liquid
Crystal Display (LCD) unit.

I. INTRODUCTION
The facility requirements in many industries, farms, hostels, hotels, offices include an
overhead tank for water, which is usually fed through an electric pump that is switched OFF
when the tank is filled up and switched ON when it is empty. So, the most common way of
knowing when the tank is filled is by observing when it overflows the brim. Depending on the
type of liquid being handled, overfilling of such a tank could lead to a great liquid material losses
ranging in the order of thousands of Naira per week depending on the extent of such application.
These losses can be prevented if the tank is monitored automatically by incorporating a feedback
monitoring mechanism which would be capable of stripping the pump ON or OFF accordingly.
Although pumps with variable speed motors could be more efficient than ON/OFF mechanism,
but the former are expensive to get and maintain especially for homes and small(or medium)
applications in Africa and other developing countries.
More so, commercially available water level sensors are expensive being imported into the
country and as such cannot be used in many homes and facilities. Sustainability of available
water resources in many areas of the globe is now a major issue. This has much to do with poor
water allocation, inefficient use, lack of adequate and integrated water management. Water is
indispensible input in agriculture, industries and homes. Therefore, efficient use and monitoring
of water are critical in proper water management.
Moreover, the common method of water level control for homes and offices is simply to start
the feed pump at a low water level and allow it to run until a higher water level is reached in the
water tank. Proper monitoring is necessary to ensure water sustainability and disbursement
linked to sensing and automation, and such program based approach entails microcontroller
based automated water level sensing and controlling [12].
More importantly, advancement of control system in engineering have created different ways
in which automatic switching systems can solve water management problems in homes and
industries especially in the developing countries. This control system has an automatic pumping
system attached to it so as to refill the tank once the liquid gets to the lower threshold, while
switching off the pump once the liquid gets to the highest threshold [Leigh.D, (2003)]
The aim of this present work is to develop an independent water level control system with
design based on ultrasonic transducer (sensor) thereby addressing problems of untimely response
and frequent breakdown of contact sensors due to surface coating and corrosion from the water
medium which characterized existing water level control based contact sensors. Our developed
system controls, monitors and maintains the water level in the tank (overhead or surface ) and
ensures the continuous flow of water round the clock without the labor stress of manually
switching the pump ON or OFF thereby saving time, electrical energy, water, and prevent
overworking of the feed pump.

II. PROBLEM DEFINITION OF PROPOSED WORK

The conventional water level indicators waste time, electrical and water resources because of
the manual mode of level monitoring and switching of the feed pump. The existing automatic
water level indicators suffer limitations because of the low response rate and frequent breakdown
of contact sensors.
Arduino UNO, an active microprocessor in this design is commercially available which is
electronically and mechanically fragile, hence the needs to replace Arduino UNO with rugged
and cost effective fabricated units from available cheap components.
In Nigeria, there are no known realized circuitry for the water level sensing and control till
date as such devices are usually imported[2].
This paper looks into the development and implementation of such a simple and cost effective
feedback regulator for use in applications where there are needs to real timely monitor the water
levels.

III. DESIGN OF THE AUTOMATED OIL LEVEL SYSTEM

A. Description of Liquid Level Regulator System
The entire system is a closed loop automated device as shown schematically in Figure 1.It
uses liquid level as input to control power supply to a liquid pump. Liquid level will be
monitored using a immovable and non contact ultrasonic sensor placed strategically to detect and
determine the present level of the liquid in percentage volume. The output signal from
the receiver(R) of the ultrasonic sensor is fed into the electronic circuit, where such
signal is transduced into ON or OFF signal that trips the power supply to the pump.

Figure. 1: Schematic Diagram of the Entire Water Level Indicator/ Regulator

B .Ultrasonic Sensor as Liquid Level Regulator
The two traditional ways of locating the level of water in a tank are either by tapping down
the side of the tank until the sound suddenly changes, or by removing the tank cover and dipping
in a measuring stick [1]. The first method is notoriously unreliable, while the second method can
be awkward and time consuming,. A more sophisticated and advanced approach to the sensing of
the water level in a tank utilizes various electronic circuitry developed and deployed for water
level sensing [1] based on integrated circuit technology and the output signal from a water
sensor can be harnessed in a form suitable for regulating the level. Using electronic devices to
achieve ON /OFF switching is not an entirely new thing. According to [11] who captured an
informal version of the evolution of the microprocessor, the transistor developed by Bell
Laboratories in 1947 was intended to replace vacuum tube to switch electronic signal on or off. It
was, however, not until 1950 that integrated circuit (IC) was developed at Texas Instruments. In
this present work, ATMEGA 328PU as an IC plays specialized role in the circuitry. Ultrasonic
sensor works on the basic time-of-flight principle which state that sending a sound wave from a
piezoelectric transducer to the contents of the vessel which may be liquid, solid or slurries. In the
case of liquid level controller/indicator, liquid level can be determined by measuring the trip time
difference between a transmitted ultrasonic pulse and a reflected echo.

The liquid levels determination is done by electronically converting the time of arrival of
echo as recorded by the receiver (R) of the ultrasonic sensor from incident waves from
transmitter (T) as shown in Fig. 6.
It is known that sound travels through air at about 344m/s(1129ft/s),The total distance (D) the
travelled by the sound wave from the transmitter(T) to get water surface and back to the
receiver (R) of the ultrasonic sensor ( as shown in the fig. 1) can be determined by taking the
total time(t) for the round trip distance(to and fro) and multiply it by speed(s) of sound waves in
air, which is 344mls (or 1129ft/s).
In short, we can write
D = t x 344 (or 1129) (1)
Note that the round trip distance means that the sound wave travelled two times distance (to
and fro liquid level) before it was detected by the receiver (R) of the ultrasonic sensor. The actual
distance, d from which we can compute the liquid level (Volume) is obtained from:
 𝑫
d= (2)
𝟐

The shape of the tank containing the liquid determines how we compute the volume. In this
work, we consider cylindrical shape and as such the volume (V) is computed using
Volume, V = 𝝅r2h (3)
The r is the structurally measured radius of the circular section of the cylindrical tanks, h,
which is the height of the cylindrical tank and will be taken as the actual distance, d obtained
above. Then, we can write
V = 3.14 xr2d since 𝝅 ≈ 3.14 (4)
These parameters (r and d) will be treated as inputs to a programmable unit of the module as
implemented by Arduino IDE.
More so, for convenience, the level and volume is expressible in percentage of the maximum
volume using the equation:
𝑫𝒆𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒆𝒅 𝒗𝒐𝒍𝒖𝒎𝒆
Volume in Percentage = x 100 (5)
𝐌𝐚𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐮𝐮𝐦 𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞

All these numerically stages are implemented electronically and final results: real time
volume (liquid level) in percentage (%) is display on the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) unit of
the module.

IV. CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS FOR THE WATER LEVEL INDICATOR

The module is fabricated out of available active and passive components. Some of the
components:
(a) Factory/Commercial Arduino UNO is replaced by rigged and cheap assembly of ATmega
328PU with IC socket, crystal oscillator, 22pF capacitor and 1KΩ preset resistor.
Arduino UNO consist of both a physical programmable circuit board called microcontroller
and a piece of software, or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that runs on your
computer, used to write and upload computer code to physical board
An Arduino UNO is a commercial microprocessor board based on the ATmega328P, which is
an 8-bit microcontroller with 32KB of Flash memory and 2KB of RAM, It contains everything
needed to support the microcontroller: simply connect it to a computer with USB cable or power
it with an AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get stated
(b) Others materials (electronic and electrical) are Buzzer, Relay, Capacitor, Resistor,
Transformer, MQ2 Sensor, Liquid Crystal Display(LCD).
The entire module has 5 parts/units which are: Sensor unit, Control unit, Display unit, Power
supply unit and Pump control unit.
For simplicity and convenience, separate unit is systemically built by fixing and soldering the
required components on the boards. These units are thereafter coupled using the integrated
circuit diagram as shown in fig.2.
In this design, it is required that the pump stops working when the water level reached a
certain level and it starts working when it reduces to certain level. In order to achieve this, we
take advantage of the conductivity of water or any other liquid that has an appreciable level of
electrical conduction [17].
For the operation of the module, 12V d.c which was properly rectified from high voltage
mains a.c. was sent to the input while the output is grounded through 100KΩ resistor by a point
wire. The 12V d.c would not be complete its electrical path unless there is a signal from control.
The required signal gets to control unit only when there is water in the tank, as such another
point wire must be positioned at a desired height/level for contact with water and this wire is
connected to the control pin.
As a result, when there is no water in the tank, the connection to the control unit (pin) is open
circuited and the resistor pulls down the voltage. As the liquid level increases, the liquid gives an
electrical continuity which generate a signal at the control unit.
Once the signal is generated, which in turn create positive voltage at one end of the resistor.
This positive voltage is then used to trigger the base region of the transistor, which in turn
triggers the a relay that is able to switch the pump ON/OFF.
Figure 2: Circuit Diagram of the Water Level Indicator

Figure 3: shows the assemblage components

for the 4 units of the Module Figure 4:Shows the entire system with the
Control Units.

V. CALIBRATION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THE LIQUID

LEVEL INDICATOR
On order to achieve high level of accuracy of our developed module, the module at the point
of installation must be calibrated. The acceptable error margin of 0.17% by maximum is
evaluated. This is error could be attributed to fact that temperature and humidity of the
environment and the position of the ultrasonic sensor affect the accuracy of the ultrasonic
sensor[19].
More so, for performance evaluation of the system, it was connected to 12V, 5amp electric
water pump. The maximum was set at 99.83% whereas the minimum was 0.17% of the volume
holding capacity of the tank. The pump was connected through the control unit while the
ultrasonic sensor was strategically positioned above the water inlet level and free from
uncontrolled turbulence of the water from inlet. As soon as the water level attained the
programmed highest level, the control unit switched OFF the pump. In case of lowest level
testing, water is drained continuously until the lowest level was reached, then the control unit
switched the pump ON.
 It is interesting to know that we can fix the lowest level of the water at around 50% of the
volume holding capacity of the tank so that the system can always maintain water level. Thus,
the module real timely regulates water level between these two situationally determined limits as
long as there was power supply to all the units working as a system.

Fig. 5: Shows the system ready for System Fig. 6: shows the Transmitter (T: up) and
Calibration Receiver (R: down) of the Ultrasonic sensor

VI. RESULTS
An ultrasonic sensor based water level indicator was developed and constructed using
available components and materials and it is successfully tested. The electronic circuitry was
realized, especially by replacing the factory based, commercial and fragile Arduino UNO with
cost effective and electronically rugged assemblage. A transparent cylinder vessel was used as a
water tank model to test the developed system.
The non contact ultrasonic sensor is strategically positioned on the peak of the vessel thereby
solving the problems of frequent replacement of contact and submersible sensor which
characterize existing commercial and expensive water indicator.
The module detected, controlled and maintained the level of water. The level of the water in
the vessel is indicated in % of the volume holding capacity of the tank which is displayed on the
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) unit as shown in fig.7.
Figure 7 50.81% of Volume displayed as output on the LCD

VII. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The testing and performance evaluation of the system showed that it can regulate water level
within the specified limits. These limits are usually determined by factors such as rate of electric
power availability and rate of water usage.
The successful development of this electronically rugged and cost effective module would be
useful in industries, small and medium scale enterprises, farms, homes, laboratories and other
applications where it is economical to save electric power, labor, time and water (and other ionic
chemicals) stored in overhead and underground tanks.

VIII LIMITATION / FUTURE WORK

This developed system can only indicate and maintain water level. However, knowing the
status of the source of water/ liquid (that is whether there is water or not at source) is still a
challenge. If there is no water at the source, the water pump would start running unnecessarily
and overheating of the pump set in. This limitation can be addressed by incorporating another
sensor [17].This can form the basis for future work to improve on this design.
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