Cost Efficient Automatic Filling System for Differently Sized Bottles

Liquid filling is an essential feature in many industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, food and beverage, paint etc. The purpose of the paper is to design, implement and monitor a completely automated low-cost system for filling liquids from a main tank into bottles of different sizes. The size of the bottle is identified with the help of a vertical arrangement of three proximity sensors. The filling of the liquid is done with solenoid valve and timers are used to control the filling time to attain maximum accuracy. The entire process is automated with PLC and no operator is needed during the functioning of the system. The sensors and solenoid valve are periodically tested automatically so that the efficiency of the system is maintained and no error occurs while filling. The control, monitoring and data acquisition is done with the help of SCADA. This enables the starting and stopping of the system through a computer system (local or remote). SCADA helps to transfer the data from the controller to another database for documentation purposes. Dynamic visualization is also made possible with SCADA. Since the entire system process is connected to SCADA via communication hardware, all the features done by the local SCADA system can also be accessed from a remote location using a remote desktop software with free of cost. When compared with other existing models, the proposed system has the additional advantages such as low-cost automatic size identification system based on height, dynamic data updating and monitoring, low-cost remote access and automatic error detection.