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Weight Measurement by using Strain Gauge

Report of Summer Internship 2018
( Duration: 15th May to 30th June)
By
Manish Kumar Pandey
( linkedin.com/in/manish-pandey-7b8947147 )

Rajendra Prajapat
( linkedin.com/in/rajendra-prajapat-b04b68141 )

Devada Deepak
( devadadeepak@gmail.com )
Under the Supervision of
Professor Siddhartha Sen
( http://www.iitkgp.ac.in/department/EE/faculty/ee-
ssen )

Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of

Technology, Kharagpur
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CONTENTS

TOPICS PAGE NO.

 INTRODUCTION 3

 MOTIVATION 6

 OBJECTIVE 7

 CIRCUIT DIAGRAM 8

 PROCEDURE 9

 OBSERVATION TABLE 13

 RESULT & CONCLUSION 13

 REFFERENCE 14
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INTRODUCTION

Strain is the amount of deformation of a body due to an applied force.

More specifically, strain (ε) is defined as the fractional change in length,
as shown in Figure 1 below.

ε =∆L/L
Strain Gauge consists of a very fine wire or, more commonly,
metallic foil arranged in a grid pattern. The grid pattern maximizes the
amount of metallic wire or foil subject to strain in the parallel direction
(Figure 2). The cross sectional area of the grid is minimi
minimized
zed to reduce
the effect of shear strain and Poisson Strain. The grid is bonded to a
thin backing, called the carrier, which is attached directly to the test
specimen. Therefore, the strain experienced by the test specimen is
transferred directly to the st
strain
rain gauge, which responds with a linear
change in electrical resistance. Strain gauges are available commercially
with nominal resistance values from 30 to 3000 Ω, with 120, 350, and
1000 Ω being the most common values.
A fundamental parameter of the strastrain
in gauge is its sensitivity to strain,
expressed quantitatively as the gauge factor (GF). Gauge factor is
defined as the ratio of fractional change in electrical resistance to the
fractional change in length (strain):

GF= ( ∆R/R ) ÷ ε
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Constant Current Source (CCS) in electronics is a device/circuit

that produces a constant value of current regardless of source voltage
or load resistance. A constant current circuit can also be used as a
current limiter.

Wheatstone Bridge was originally developed by Charles

Wheatstone to measure unknown resistance values and as a means of
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calibrating measuring instruments, voltmeters, ammeters, etc, by the

use of a long resistive slide wire.

Vo=[(R3/R3+R4)-(R2/R1+R2)]

If four active gauges are employed in the circuit, the arrangement is

called Full Bridge as shown below. It is automatically temperature
compensated when all four active gauges bonded on the same
material, and the highest sensitivity is obtained.

Differential Amplifier shown in the circuit is a combination of both

inverting and non-inverting amplifiers.
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Vout=(Rf/R)*(V2-V1)
where Rf=R3=R4 & R=R1=R2

MOTIVATION

The early electrical strain gauge bridge circuits employed constant

voltage sources for bridge excitation. The techniques developed for the
classical direct-current and alternating-current component measuring
bridges were transferred to the strain gauge bridges with only 9 minor
modification. With the introduction of the semi-conductor strain
gauges the advantages to be gained by the use of constant current
bridge excitation became apparent. However, the difficulties associated
with the construction of suitable constant current circuitry inhibited its
introduction on a large scale until the mid 1970's. The availability of
inexpensive high gain, integrated circuit amplifiers has simplified the
task of producing practical constant current supplies. While the use of
constant current sources does provide a bridge of enhanced stability,
the network shares some of the problems of the constant voltage
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circuit and introduces a few of its own. In this paper an attempt has
been made to present some of the formulae for the constant current
bridge, to investigate the effects of lead resistance and to examine, for
the simplest bridge, the influence of initial offset compensation (initial
balance) on the sensitivity of the bridge to strain and on the bridge
configurations to be used and mainly focused upon the linearization of
the output voltage with the strain variation.

OBJECTIVE

 To design a constant current source by using IC LM317

 To build Wheatstone Bridge by using four active gauges

 To build amplifier circuit by using IC 741

 To interface LCD with arduino uno

 To calibrate weight with the voltage variation

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CIRCUIT DIAGRAM
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PROCEDURE

 Initially we had to design a constant current source by using IC

LM317 used as a series pass constant current source with a single
resistor. Resistor range is: 0.8 ohms < R1 < 120 ohms. The formula
is Iout = 1.25V / R1.

 We provided the constant current of 25 mA to the load as we

were using R1 of 50 ohm.
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 Full bridge strain guage wheatstone bridge which having Req 350
ohm we made as a load after designing CCS. We created some
disturbance in strain guage and were making circuit unbalanced
so that we could find out some voltage variation as an output.
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 Varying voltage at the bridge were amplifying by the use of

differential amplifier having voltage gain of 10.

 Some coding were be done in arduino software to interface the

LCD and display the values in it.

 Amplified voltages were displayed in 16*2 LCD.

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 Finally we calibrated the weights with amplified voltages. During this

calibration we added some extra values in th the
e program
pr to
compensate the offsets.
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OBSERVATION TABLE

 WEIGHTS vs DISPLAYING VALUE

Serial no WEIGHT ( gm ) DISPLAYING

VALUE
1 0 0
2 50 53
3 100 99.01
4 300 299.8
5 400 405
6 450 456
7 500 500.3
8 800 800.7
9 900 913
10 1000 1000.2

RESULT & CONCLUSION

We observed that all the weights were likely to be closed with the
displaying values. Somewhere we found significant error or
nonlinearity due to variation in offsets present in the bridge and
opamp as well. The range of weights can be measured is 50 gm to
1000 gm.
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REFFERENCE

Operational amplifiers and linear integrated circuits Robert F.

Coughlin, Frederick F. Driscoll. [electronic resource] - 4th ed.