Around the World with 80 GHz – We Love Radar ... and Poland

Liquids and solids place very different demands on level measurement. Interference signals and installations inside containers and silos create additional challenges. The practical demonstrations focused once again on particularly demanding measurement applications in various industries. The media in the demo setups ranged from oils and sugar to tempting frothy draught beer, which the seminar participants were of course allowed to taste directly at the end of the seminar.

Here, for the first time, I experienced participants being almost as excited about the measurement demonstration, where the radar beam of VEGAPULS 69 measured right through several packs of refined sugar, as the beer they enjoyed at the conclusion. Sugar, I later learned, is a real German-Polish success story. The world's first industrial sugar refinery began operations in Poland at the beginning of the 19th century. This happened after a German chemist discovered the beet as a source of sugar and demonstrated how it could put an end to the sugar bottleneck in Europe – until then the only known source of sugar was sugarcane. Sugar has been, and is still being, produced near the seminar location for generations, so it was not surprising that almost every one of the seminar participants had had their own personal experiences with the medium.