Measurements & Electronic Instruments Laboratory Experiment Manual

Department of Electrical Engineering, I.I.T. Kharagpur

Experiment No. : 8
Load Cell
Introduction:
Load Cells are universally used as electronic weighing machines. A typical load cell consists
of a cylindrical platform over which four identical strain gages are fixed with adhesive as
shown in fig. 1. If a weight W is placed over the platform, the compressive strain developed
along with the axial direction would be:

Where, Y is the Young’s modulus and A is the cross section area of the cylinder. The strain
developed along the radial direction would be tensile and magnitude γ.ε, where γ is the
Poisson’s ratio of the material.
A strain gage is a resistive element whose resistance changes with the applied strain due to
the change in dimension of the gage material. The resistance will increase if the strain gage
element is under tension. The change in resistance with applied strain is given by the
relationship:

where G is the Gage Factor which is constant for a particular strain gage material. The
nominal resistance R of each of the four strain gage used here is 350Ω. A typical value of the
gage factor of a metallic strain gage is 2.0. Fig.2 shows the arrangement how four strain
gages are connected in form of an unbalanced Wheatstone bridge. The unbalanced bridge
output voltage can be approximated as:

The load cell used in this experiment can measure load up to 10 kg and has a uniform
sensitivity 1.5mV/V, i.e. if the excitation voltage E is 10 V, then the bridge output voltage
would be 15 mV for 10 kg load. The electrical connection diagram inside the load cell is
shown in fig.3. since the voltage magnitude is too low, a suitable differential amplifier circuit
is needed to amplify the voltage to a suitable level; Apart from that, facilities for zero
adjustment should be provided so that, for zero applied load, the output should also be zero.

Experiment:
1. Apply 10 V DC excitation to the bridge (between Red and Black lead wires). Check
for the proper polarities of the lead wire connection.
2. Constant on a breadboard a differential amplifier circuit of gain 10 with offset null
adjustment as shown in fig.4. Connect the output of the amplifier to a second signal
ended inverting amplifier of variable gain as shown. Connect the bridge output
terminals to the input of the differential amplifier.

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 3. With zero load, adjust the offset null so that, the final output voltage V0 is around
1mV.
4. Apply 10 kg load on the load cell and measure the output V0. Adjust the feedback
resistance Rf to get V0 = 1.0 V. Now withdraw the load. Do not disturb the adjusting
resistance values from now onwards.
5. Apply load in steps (e.g. 500 gm., 1 kg, 2 kg, 5 kg …) and measure the output
voltage. Plot voltage vs load and calculate the nonlinearity for full scale reading.

Report:
1. Derive equation (3).
2. The resistance of the strain gage changes with temperature. But the bridge
configuration used here will provide a perfect temperature compensation arrangement
justify.
3. State some other applications of strain gages.

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