Flow meter 3

[luciansm]

Hi evryone.
My name is Lucian, I'm a Computer Engineer.
I'm working in a project of a company to develop a flow meter using a microcontroller and Infrared sensors.
I'm stuck in the mechanic fluid part.
We're trying to develop this product basing in the mechanic model of the attached picture.
The liquid will enter in the top and pairs of IR leds and Phototransistors and the A/D converter of the microcontroller will read the voltage oscilation caused by the difference of the density of the liquid.
The liquid will pass with pulsating vacuum.
The goal of the 3 channels is to segment the liquid and increase the precision of the read.
I'm having sobre problems with the voltage read and I'm starting to think that this problems are related with fluid mechanics like turbulent flow.
We're developing this mechanics prototypes using a 3-D Printer.
My goal is to develop a mechanic prototype that will segment the liquid with no turbulent flow (or less tuebulent possible).

I don't know much about fluid mechanic, but I studied a little bit about Reynold Number and turbulent flow.

If someone could help I would be grateful.

Thanks and sorry for the bad english.

 

[luciansm]

Hi btrueblood....
Yes, the cleaning will be a problem too.
The 3D printer it's used only for the prototypes.
And, as you said, there's a lot of milk meters like this one that I showed before.
One of them it's from a company called Delaval, but, I suspect that the technology still the same (the patent that I showed it's from 1992).