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Volts or Amps – the crucial question.
Volts or Amps In a past Transducer Thursday we looked at Galvanometers, in an upcoming article we’ll look at digital voltmeters. Both have been used to create read outs from sensor data. That therefore leads to a question, what do we want transducers to output? A current variant signal or a voltage variant signal? In…
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Magmeters
Magmeter – Magnetic Flow Metres How do you measure flow through a pipe? It’s a trickeier problem than it initially sounds. It’s also a question with many answers. Many approaches centre around pressure transducers measuring total pressure and static pressure to then infer dynamic pressure and therefore fluid velocity. Although this means that the density…
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Thermocouple
The Thermocouple Many of the transducers we’ve looked at over the last few weeks really are not transducers in the strictest sense, they don’t change a form of energy into another. Other items we’ve looked at, tend to exploit electro-magnetism and changes in fields to produce measurable results, all interesting and fascinating in their own…
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Strain Gauges
The Strain Gauge The humble strain gauge, technically, speaking, is not a transducer as it doesn’t transfer energy from one form to another. However, given it is fundamental to a wide range of engineering analysis in the modern world, and Flintmore have extensive experience working with them, it felt wrong to exclude it from transducer…
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Proximity Probes
Proximity Probes Proximity sensors are all around us. Most of us carry a device with several of them in our pocket, but few of us know how they work or have given them a second (or even first) thought. Measuring distance electronically is far less practical than we would initially think. For something so easy…
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The Galvanometer
The Galvanometer One of the earliest and most significant transducers used for instrumentation is the galvanometer. Practically, it is one of the most important inventions ever produced by humankind, but it had rather humble beginnings. Its first, and rather gruesome form, was the frog leg galvanoscope. Many of us have heard that one of the…
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The GM Tube
The Gieger Muller Tube The first transducer we’re looking at as part of our series on transducers is the GM Tube. You might not know what a GM Tube is, or even what they look like, but you almost certainly know what one sounds like. A slow-clicking sound in the background suddenly rises to a crescendo when…
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Transducer Thursdays
Our modern world—smartphones, electric cars, wind turbines, the Internet of Things, AI, drones—relies upon humble transducers. Transducers, technically speaking, are any devices that convert energy from one form to another, whether that be mechanical to electrical, electric to chemical, or chemical to EM—any form of energy into another. In their purest form, any heat engine,…
