Low creep and hysteresis silicon load cell based on a force-to-liquid pressure transformation

Important problems in load cells are creep and hysteresis. Expensive high grade steels are used in order to reduce these effects. In this paper a silicon load cell design is presented which is based on a force-to-liquid-pressure transformation. The design is insensitive to hysteresis and creep, can be made at very low costs and is able to measure loads up to 1000 kg with an accuracy of 0.03 %. Analytical, numerical and experimental results on a macroscopic steel load cell are in very close agreement with each other

Low creep and hysteresis load cell based on a force to fluid pressure transformation

In this paper, a low-cost load cell (force sensor) is presented in which the force to be measured is transformed into a fluid pressure. The design consists of a boss, attached to a membrane, and a bucket-like structure which encloses a fluid volume. This geometry causes a force to be transformed into a pressure. We show that this transformation only depends on the geometrical parameters of the load cell and that it is independent of the Young's modulus of the membrane resulting in very low creep and hysteresis. Experimental results with loads up to 1000 kg show very good repeatability and are in close agreement with both analytical and numerical calculations