Automation of Manual Process of Liquid Mixing

System
Swarnmani Singh
International Institute of Information Technology,
Pune,India.
swarnmanis_aug10@embed.isquareit.ac.in
Abstract: This paper deals with the design of electronic
system that can be used to replace the older system deployed
using mechanical and PLC based subsystems for the purpose
of Liquid mixing at large quantities in food industries. The
system also includes a unique Interlock method to allow the
resume of previous process in case of any interruption to the
operation due to any kind of failure.
I.

losses. To avoid this Interlock system is provided. The

Interlock system stores the current status of the system
when power failure takes place. This entire status is stored
in memory chip interfaced to the microcontroller. When
power resumes the microcontroller reads this status from the
memory chip and resumes the recipe which was previously
begin made.

INTRODUCTION
III.

The industrial control systems always require some sort

of electronic control units at the higher level of heirarchy.
The earlier control systems consisted of PLC based systems
for providing stepwise control over the various tasks that
have to be performed to complete a particular industrial
process. With the advent of high speed, high perfomance
microcontrollers these PLC based systems are being
replaced by microcontroller based systems. This paper deals
with microcontroller based implementation of liquid mixing
system which can automatically control the flow of various
liquids as per requirement of the user.
II.

SYSTEM BLOCKS

The hardware design is divided as follows :Control unit

Transducer : Cantilever Loadcell
Signal conditioning circuit
Analog to digital conversion
External memory (Flash/EEPROM)
Input device : keypad
Display : LCD(Liquid Crystal Display) (20x4)
Digital output drive circuit
Power supply unit
USB(Universal Serial Bus) interface
PC software

SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE SYSTEM

IV.

Total number of the level1 valves: 6 valves

Minimum Resolution : 10gm
Accuracy: 100gm.
Maximum Number of recipe storage: 100
System Failure Alarm
Interlock system to store the current condition of recipe
under faulty conditions (ex. power failure).
Consider a case when the system is in operational state
when one particular liquid is flowing into the hopper. At this
instant power failure takes place. Due to this the entire
system will stop. When power is again provided to system
after some time the entire system will reset and the
previous state of sytem will be lost. Hence all the liquids
previously filled in the hopper has to be thrown and the
particular recipe has to be restarted. This will result is heavy

WORKING OF SYSTEM

The system can be divided into two parts, first being the
mechanical system and the other being electronic control
system. Figure1 shows the basic mechanical structure of the
system which consists of six different liquid containers
which are connected to the main dispensing system through
pipes. The liquid flow in each of these pipes is controlled
through solenoid valves operating on AC supply. The
dispensing system consists of a main pipe which is
connected to a motor pump for creating pressure. A flow
control valve and setup valve is connected after the pump.
The flow control valve is connected to a stepper motor
which controls the flow of liquid in terms of Kg/min. The
setup valve is the final control valve and acts as an ON/OFF
valve. The electronic control system consists of analog
circuitry used for conditioning the analog signals from
loadcell, ADC, controller unit and digital i/o circuitry.

The AC operated valves are controlled through

TRIAC circuit board which consist of BTA136 TRIAC
and an RC snubber[1][2] circuit for each TRIAC drive to
dampen the spikes generated during switching of
solenoid valves. The TRIAC board is isolated from the
microcontroller board using optoisolators.

allows system to reload the previous state of the system

where it had halted due to power failure and resume the
remaining process from there. An external 64Kb
EEPROM is interfaced to the microcontroller to save the
receipes. The system is provided with preloaded recipes,
but it can also save customized recipes generated during
runtime as per the requirements.

Figure2 Basic structure of the control system

Figure1 Basic structure of the plant system
Initially when the system is started it is in standby
mode, waiting to receive parameters to start the mixing
process. Here a receipe is to be selected which
determines the amount of each type of liquid that has to
be delivered into the Hopper placed over the Loadcell
platform. When the process is started the microcontroller
opens the valves as per the preselected parameters in the
receipe. The motor pump creates a constant pressure
which is then controlled by stepper motor operated flowrate control valve thus controlling the flow of the liquid.
The weight liquid that flows into the hopper is measured
by the loadcell and is converted to digital value by ADC
which is then processed by microcontroller to take the
necessary actions. The state of the system is displayed
and continuously updated over the alphanumeric lcd. The
state of the system and current status of the process is
transmitted through wired USB interface to the PC
hardware. This data is displayed over the PC software.
The system is also provided with Interlock technique
which saves the current state of the system and the status
of the process in case of power outage. This feature

The microcontroller being used is PIC18F4550. It is

18F series 8 bit microcontroller from Microchip.
PIC18F4550 is 40 pin IC available in DIP package with
maximum operating frequency of 48Mhz. It has 32KB
flash memory, 2KB SRAM, 256 bytes of EEPROM.
PIC18F4550 is USB2.0 compliant supporting Low speed
and Full speed modes. It has on-chip USB transceiver
with on-chip voltage regulator and 1KB Dual Access
RAM for USB. These main features of PIC18F4550 led
to its selection in this project. The analog circuitry
samples the analog signals received from loadcell and
sends equivalent digital data to PIC18F4550 via SPI
interface. The microcontroller processes this data
continuously compares it with the preselected parameters
to complete the process. The keypad is used to select the
initial parameters. A memory chip is also interfaced to
PIC using I2C bus to store the recipes. The outputs of
PIC will provided to digital output drive circuit which
will drive the solenoid valves, setup valve and flow
control valve. The entire parametric data is also
transmitted to PC software through USB interface for
displaying current status and to log the entire data.
Cantilever loadcell[3] (Make: ADI ARTECH) having
following specifications[4] is used:
Standard capacity (Kgf.) : 300

Excitation voltage
: 5Vdc-15Vdc
Nominal output
: 2.0mV/V
Non-linearity
: < 0.025% FSO
Hysteresis
: < 0.01% FSO
Non-repeatability
: < 0.02% FSO
Input resistance
: 390 15
Output resistance
: 350 5
The loadcell is bolted to a rigid support at one end and
the other end is bolted to the load bearing platform. The
loadcell is provided with excitation voltage of 5V and the
output obtained from the loadcell is provided to the
signal conditioning circuit through shielded cable, the
shield being grounded at one end. The loadcell should
never be loaded above its safe overload limit, otherwise it
will lead to permanent deformation of the loadcell, thus
making it unusable.

memory. It has 64Kb of memory which is accessed by

2-wire interface (I2C bus). AT24C64 is an EEPROM
available in 8 pin DIP package.
An enhanced 4x4 matrix keypad[5] will be used to
provide inputs to the microcontroller. The The keypad
uses only 4 GPIO lines in contrast to the conventional
keypad matrix which requires 8 GPIO lines, thus saving
IO pins for control purposes. Two of the GPIO lines are
utilized as Digital output pins and the remaining two are
configured to be used as ADC input pins.
The interface between the microcontroller and the
display is straight forward. A 20x4 monochrome
transmissive LCD which is based on Hitachi
HD44780A00 display driver IC is used to display all the
parameters. The LCD display is interfaced to PIC via
standard 4 bit interface[6].

Figure2 Loadcell & signal conditioning block

The signal conditioning circuit comprises of two
blocks. First is the gain adjust block and second is the
low pass filter block. The gain adjust block is an
instrumentation amplifier which amplifies weak analog
signals received from the loadcell. this signal is then
provided to second block of the signal conditioning
circuit which is a first order butterworth low pass filter.
The cutoff frequency of the filter is 10Khz. It is used to
stabilize and filter the output signal from unwanted high
frequency noise. This output amplified signal of the
signal conditioning circuit is then provided to analog to
digital conversion block. The analog signals are then
provided to ADC block which uses AD7798 16 bit
Sigma-Delta ADC from Analog Devices.
External memory is used to store the recipes and
current status of the system in case of power failure. The
Interlock system thus will be totally dependent on the
external memory which will store the status of the system
during power failure and when power is again available
the system resumes from the state at which it had halted
due to power failure.AT24C64 is used as external

Figure3 PI controller block

The digital output drive circuit will consist of
isolation circuit and TRIAC alongwith RC Snubber to
drive the solenoid Setup valves. The Stepper motor
control circuitry consisting of ULN2004 will also control
the stepper motor which will further control the Flowrate control valve. The microcontroller implements a
PI(Proportional Integral) controller (figure3) that uses the
weight readings obtained from the loadcell via ADC as
its input, while the flow rate is its control parameter. The
user can set the flow rate of each liquid. Since the
delivery pipe is connected to the pressure pump, which
runs at a fixed rpm thus generating a fixed pressure, the
setup valve SV7 is the only device that can control the
flow rate. As the flow rate will vary, the change in
quantity of liquid measured by the loadcell will vary
proportionally. Hence a embedded software PI control
loop is provided that receives the variations in the load

observed by the loadcell and estimates the flow of liquid

through the SV7 valve. If the liquid flow is higher than
the set value then the stepper motor is commanded to
reduce the valve opening thus constricting the flow of
liquid and when the liquid flow is lesser than the set
value then the stepper motor is commanded to increase
the valve opening thus increasing the flow of liquid.
The microcontroller unit and its associated
components derive its power from 5V supply provided
by USB interface. This same 5V supply is further filtered
and then provided to ADC and analog circuitry. A
separate 12V power supply is provided to drive the
stepper motor through ULN2004.The Solenoid valves are
driven using AC supply through TRIAC driver board.
The system is provided with USB 2.0[7] interface.
The USB interface operates in Full speed mode.The
microcontroller provides all the parametric data to the PC
through Bulk transfer mode. A custom driver is installed
on the PC when the system is plugged to the USB port of
the PC during installation. The circuit board is provided
with a USB Type B[8] receptacle which is usually rated
for 10,000 connect-disconnect cycles. The USB interface
is necessary to power up the microcontroller board.
The system will be provided with a PC software to
control the liquid mixing process. The software is
developed using Visual Studio 2005 IDE. The PC
software will display the current status of the hardware,
the current liquid being poured into the Hopper, the
amount of current liquid in the Hopper, total weight of all
the liquids in the Hopper.
The PC software also provides the option to select
any of the default recipes. The user can even generate a
new recipe by selecting the liquids and their quantity to
be mixed. The software allows the user to either store the
recipe into memory or to consider the provided
parameters as temporary recipe values. The software
stores the recipes

into the external onboard flash memory via the USB

interface. Thus there is limitation to the number of
recipes that can be stored. Also the current system does
not store the recipes onto the PC system to avoid data
integrity issues. The software does provide a log of entire
data that is gathered from the valves and the sensors. This
data can be used by the system engineer to determine the
cause of fault.
V.

CONCLUSION

The microcontroller based systems can thus be

employed to provide more efficient Liquid Mixing
systems that will enhance the speed of manufacturing
process by accurately controlling mechanical and
electrical systems. Such type of systems can be used in
Poultry food and Agro-based industries, and even in
Fertilizers, Pesticides industries,
Petrochemical industries

VI.

REFERENCES

[1] William McMurray, OPTIMUM SNUBBERS FOR POWER

SEMICONDUCTORS, IEEE IAS transactions, Vol. IA-8, No. 5,
Sept/Oct 1972, pp. 593-600
[2]Snubber design: AN437 Application note(ST Microelectronics)
http://www.st.com/stonline/books/pdf/docs/6785.pdf
[3]Cantilever loadcell basics:
http://www.sensorland.com/HowPage005.html
[4] Loadcell terms and definition :
http://www.loadcelltheory.com/LoadCellSupportTheoryPDF/loadcellter
msdefinitions.pdf
[5]Microchip LCD Tips and Tricks(Page 29)
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/groups/picmicro_sg/documents/devi
cedoc/en023491.pdf
[6] Alphanumeric LCD in 4 bit mode:
http://www.piclist.com/tecHREF/io/lcd/4b16x2lcd-ab.htm
[7] USB2.0 Specification Sheet: http://www.usb.org/developers/docs
[8]USB connector types:http://www.cablestogo.com/resources/usb.asp