Design and development of mini viscometer

Abstract

Researchers and students are using traditional falling ball viscometers, which require manual calculation of velocity and viscosity, resulting in erroneous measurements. There is lot of advancements in technology, specific improvisation needs to be made. The Arduino microcontroller is used to create a falling sphere viscometer. To measure the time taken, an IR sensor detects the ball travelling through a liquid of unknown viscosity; data processing and connection with the digital display are handled by an Arduino microcontroller. The improved viscometer's results are validated using an Ostwald viscometer and available reference sources. The positive results suggest that the new Viscometer may be utilised in the laboratory to help students better understand the idea of viscosity. Experimentation carried out on three kinds of oils, they are coconut oil, cooking oil and engine oil. The results are, the viscosity of the coconut oil, cooking oil and engine oil are 35.328cp, 38.789cp and 54.464cp respectively.