Development of a Low -Cost and Precise Liquid Metering Device for Automatic Nutrient-Solution Control

양액 자동조제용 액제 정밀계량 장치 개발

A low-cost and precise metering device, which is suitable to automatic mixing of nutrient-solution for hydroponic culture, was developed for small-scale growers. The metering device was composed of three parts those were supply pumps, metering cylinders and venturi tube. Those parts were controlled by personal computer with time-based odoff control method. To verify the performance of the developed metering device, the relationship between operating time and discharge was examined and the accuracy of the developed metering device was compared with commercial metering pumps. The results of this study are as follows. 1. The correlation coefficient between the flow rate and operating time was 0.9999, and the linear regression equation computed was y=21.759x, where y is the discharge(g) and x is the operating time(s). 2. The developed device has greater accuracy than commercial metering pumps in terms of the full-scale error. Calculated errors for the developed metering device and two commercial pump were $\pm$0.3 %, $\pm$2.45 % and $\pm$1.38 % respectively. 3. Above results show developed metering device is a useful tool for nutrient-solution control system.