PLC based automated liquid mixing and bottle filling system

Automating repetitive tasks in the industries increases the productivity; reduces the probability of error and maintain product quality. Traditional methods of mixing fixed quantities of different types of liquids and filling them in bottles involve manual mixing of the constituent components based on measurements and bottling of the mixture as desired. Manual handling of such tasks is time consuming; expensive and often lack consistency in product quality due to human errors. A Laboratory Prototype of a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) based automated liquid mixing and bottle filling system is designed to automate the control and mixing of two different liquids in predefined proportion and filling the generated mixture in bottles to achieve quality control; reduce human intervention and improve productivity. The mixing system draws fluids from two storage tanks and mix them in a user selectable pre-defined proportion and stores the mixture in an overhead reservoir. The bottling system transfers the mixture from the overhead reservoir to conveyor fed empty bottles based on the user defined ladder logic. The developed laboratory prototype of the automated system has housekeeping features; which include high and low level liquid indicators; emergency alarm for warning the operator and automatic stop features etc.

I. Introduction

Electrical machinery has become the integral part of the industry as a result of the fast growing pace of automation. Automating the routing tasks in the industries increases the productivity and reduces the probability of error in the system. Traditional industrial tasks involve manual operation of machineries and the tasks are dependent on manual intervention; which can cause error in the process; in addition to being time consuming and expensive. Automation of operations reduces operating costs; production time and error and improves the product quality [1]–[3].