alt.energy.renewable

Morris Dovey wrote:
> Mike wrote:
>
>
>
>> Where the displacer is free floating you'd maybe use a couple of
>> displacement transducers and a lot of pc processing, for the solar
>> fluidyne I'm stuck at the moment of what you could do - Maybe use
>> clear pipes and a video camera and sample the levels at the frame
>> rate?
>
> I think your pressure transducer idea is a winner. I've been
> scratching my head over the idea of building tubular capacitors
> that could fit inside the vertical tubes to see if I could
> measure the height (depth) of the water by measuring a
> capacitance variance in real time.
>
> If I can extract pressure and water levels, I should be able to
> derive what I /think/ I'm after. :-)

You might be able to use ultrasonic range finders like they
use on car backup sensors and robot kits. Mount them at the
top of the tube pointing down and they should measure the
distance to the water level.

I think the pressure inside your fluidyne will be the same
everywhere at any one moment so a single pressure transducer
mounted anywhere inside should work.

Anthony
--
"I'm not a mechanical engineer but I play one on the Internet."