Detecting Full Maple Syrup Bottle

I can imagine; I have seen the inside of food factories where they bottled food (apple sauce, red cabbage and apple pieces, ...) and what can go wrong. Yours might possibly worse.

Lots of advice here while I was away for a couple hours. Hoping to answer some of the questions:

Filling a container of the right volume and then transferring it to the final package is an option, but it doesn't give a lot of adjustability to use different container sizes. That was why my initial thought was a probe I could set at the desired liquid level and then adjust it as necessary for different bottles

Changing in volume with changing temperature is an issue- we want to package the syrup above 180 degrees to make sure there is no mold inside the bottle. It will shrink a bit when it cools. If you ever encounter a completely "brim-full" syrup bottle know that it wasn't hot-packed and won't keep very long at all. State Laws allow for this shrinkage because of the necessity of hot packing.

Topping off the bottle manually is a possibility, but I'm trying to get away from this. Ideally I'll set up a couple of these stations to fill several bottles at once and I can just focus on feeding the empty bottles and putting the caps on.

Thanks everyone for the advice and help!

Idea not mentioned yet

Reflection,

  1. shine a light beam (laser, UV, IR,... ) on a 45° angle in the opening of the bottle.
  2. if it reflect to a sensor at ~45° the syrup is near the top.

Assumptions

  • the syrup is reflective enough for chosen wavelength
  • detection is possible just before it is full so you have some millis to react
  • the steeper the angle of the light, the deeper it will peek into the bottle

You could manually test the reflectiveness of the syrup if this works.

That was my 4th bullet point.

Lights, floats, weight are "stage" dependent. Real maple syrup has a sugar concentration, color and viscosity gradient depending on boil time. The syrup can continue being reduced through soft-ball (maple caramel), hard-ball (maple hard-candy).

Sap to medium-light syrup ratio is 35:1. I would tend the barrel fire all day, then bring the (not yet syrup) 25:1 inside for the final 10:1 reduction. The house smelled of maple. We would make about 5 gallons in three gradients, plus candy, each season. Waffles and flapjacks every Sunday, all year, and some for the farmers down the road.

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Hi,
use two optical sensors.
First to indicate 3/4 or 7/8 full and to signal slow down of flow.
Second sensor to detect full.

Tom... :smiley: :+1: :coffee: :australia:

Peristaltic pump between the tank and the bottle. Count the pump shaft rotations.

Or, use the more expensive cousin the positive displacement pump.

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Oops, sorry missed it