In oil industry or oil plant, there are a lot of oil storage tanks available. It is vital for the oil company to know their daily oil stock simply because they are in the oil business. Therefore, they need to measure the oil volume and further work out its tonnage. They need to know the exact volume of oil and to do that there are various methods. One of the traditional method is by using a dipping tape.
What is a dipping tape? Sorry, I could not find a suitable and proper definition for it. My own
definition would be a tape made of from stainless steel (can be other material as well) and has some sort of calibration along it (up to 15m, or 20m, it depends on your tank height) and it's used to measure the ullage in a storage tank (filled with oil/liquid). Does anybody have a suitable definition of dipping tape?
I guess the next question from you will be: What is
ullage?
The amount which a tank or vessel lacks of being full.
is the empty space present when a shipping container is not full.
The space in a tank not occupied by its contents. Used as a measure of storage space still available. I hope the
ullage definition would give you some idea on the concept.
A guy doing ullaging job at a ship tank
Dip weight - It is attached to the end of the tapeFor each storage tank, there'll be some sort of calibration table. From it, we can know what is the volume of oil at certain height. The tank height is also recorded in the calibration table. So, in order to know the volume of oil, we substract the tank height from the ullage (which we get from the dipping tape measurement), and we shall get the oil level height. From there, we can already get the volume of oil and work out the tonnage (with the temperature reading available).
