1.5mm precision liquid level measurement using impedance spectroscopy

An impedance measurement based level sensor is proposed using a co-axial probe for sensing liquid level in a container. The co-axial sensing probe is made with a hollow stainless steel outer conductor enclosing an insulated inner conductor. The impedance of the co-axial probe varies with the water level in a nonlinear fashion. The supporting electronics was developed using MSP 432 microcontroller unit (MCU) platform from Texas Instruments (TI) and a newly designed Impedance Analyzer-Analog Front End (IA-AFE) developed at TI. An inverter amplifier based circuit was implemented within the IA-AFE for impedance measurement. Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is calculated on the MCU platform from the sampled input and output square wave voltages of the IA-AFE. The proposed sensor shows a maximum error within ±1.5 mm, for the probe of length 40 cm. The proposed system offers an accurate and economical liquid level measurement platform outperforming the state-of-art level sensors to the best of our knowledge.