Piezoelectric strain monitoring?

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Beer:30
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Piezoelectric strain monitoring?

Post by Beer:30 »

I was curious about using one of your portable scope units for monitoring a piezoelectric strain gauge over, maybe, a tenth of a second on a 1-10 microsecond scale. I assume your "wallet friendly" model will work well for my intended purpose but assumptions have a way of biting me in the backside. 8-bit resolution should be more than enough for my purposes.

Thoughts?

Martyn
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Re: Piezoelectric strain monitoring?

Post by Martyn »

Sounds feasible. I would suggest sending in details of the strain gauge to support@picotech.com and we can take a closer look for you
Martyn
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Beer:30
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Re: Piezoelectric strain monitoring?

Post by Beer:30 »

I was thinking of using these: http://www.omega.com/pptst/KFH.html in a Wheatstone bridge configuration. Not sure if I would need any signal amplification.

PeterF
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Re: Piezoelectric strain monitoring?

Post by PeterF »

Hi,
It will be possible but there are difficulties! The precise positioning of the gauges on the measured object is critical as is the method of glueing. It is very easy to ruin a complete set of gauges by just getting one thing wrong.
You will need a +/-5V energisation power supply so that the differential outputs of the wheatstone bridge at both near to 0V so you can use the most sensitive range of the scope. Even so, the output of this type of strain gauge is tiny, in the order of a few mV full scale so you will need either a high resolution (12 or 16 bit) scope or an additional DC amplifier.
Normally I would recommend using one of our high resolution, differential input data loggers (ADC-20 or ADC-24) in this application but the settling time would be too slow (60ms). Please contact me on Helpdesk (support@picotech.com) with more details of your exact application and I will try to advise further.
Regards,
PeterF.

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