Mechanical guided waves for fuel level monitoring system

Abstract

The mechanical guided waves have a wide range of applications in many types of equipment and devices. The fuel level is an important parameter which needs to be monitored for a vehicle which can be a space vehicle, an aircraft or any other. For this purpose mechanical guided waves can be used as they have several major advantages over any other methods. There are a wide ultrasonic sensors used for this purpose but in the most cases the mechanical waves are traveling through air or fuel for measuring their level. In general the wave propagation through a single media at a time is utilized. The method described in this work uses the propagation of the mechanical guided waves through two different media in the same time. The propagating media is the container wall and the other is the fuel. One of the advantages of this method is the reduction of the measurement errors when the incident angle to the fuel level surface is different from 90 degree. These situations could occur when the fuel tank is tilted or when the fuel surface is not flat. This measurement method will not be affected by these conditions.

Keywords

• fuel level monitoring
• mechanical guided waves
• magneto-resistive method
• capacitive method