A simple liquid detector for radiopharmaceutical processing systems

Sensing the presence of liquids in tubing and vessels in radiochemical processing equipment provides information important to the remote or automatic control of the production of clinical doses of radiopharmaceuticals. Although modern commercial automated radiopharmaceutical synthesis machines do not usually include liquid presence as a measured process variable, earlier more complex automated synthesis devices did; and the inclusion of such feedback can increase system reliability and simplify trouble-shooting tasks carried out by computer software or human operators. Commercial liquid level detectors are often designed for large-scale industrial processes and are therefore too large or expensive to be useful in many radiochemical hardware systems. An inexpensive miniature optical liquid detector originally by Kramer and Fuchs has been duplicated here for use in monitoring the presence of liquids in teflon tubing (1/16 in. O.D.) in an enriched oxygen-18 water recovery system