Measure liquid viscosity by tracking falling ball Automatically depending on image processing algorithm

Abstract

A fast method presented within this paper to find transparent liquid viscosity. An introduced tracking algorithm in image processing used to find a terminal velocity automatically of a falling ball in a tube that filled with a tested liquid. Terminal velocity considered an important parameter to find a liquid viscosity. Therefore, four iron balls, with different diameters and a smartphone camera are used to measure the falling ball terminal velocity. The estimated velocity from the introduced algorithm is compared with the calculated velocity and shows a good matching. The second algorithm used to estimate the viscosity of the tested liquid. The limitation of the ball diameter around 5mm to measure the terminal velocity. The result shows error matching between the fitting data and the estimated data ranging (0.00-0.1%). This method is a faster and easier experiment to use to find any transparent liquid viscosity comparing with a viscometer.