How to Calibrate Button Load Cells and Achieve Good Results
How to Calibrate Button Load Cells and Achieve Good Results
Anyone that has tried to calibrate button type load cells knows they do not repeat well in rotation. The sensitivity to off-axis or side loading conditions is quite high. High enough that 0.1 % of misalignment is going to produce a rather large cosine error. This blog is going to show that using the proper adapters can drastically improve the performance of button load cells.
Problem:
It's nearly impossible to get results to agree within 0.5 % when repositioning a button load cell.
With traditional calibration methods shown in figure 1 below, getting reproducible results on button type load cells is nearly impossible. Errors ranging from 1 percent to 10 percent are often common. In our deadweight frames we typically would experience errors from 1 to 2 percent with the traditional generally accepted method for calibrating this type of load cell.
Figure 1. The traditional method of calibrating a button load cell. This is a compression type pad.
Test Plan:
Conduct a test on the same button load cell with traditional calibration methods versus using Morehouse custom adapters.
A test was conducted as shown in figure 2.
Figure 2: Test pictures and data using traditional versus Morehouse Adapters
Above data shows a 525 % improvement in rotation using Morehouse Adapters. The reproducibility error went from 1.045 % to 0.199 %. It is worth mentioning that most button load cell systems cannot achieve better than 0.25 % of full scale even with the proper adapters. We have seen some specifications where the end user is expecting 0.1 % of full scale or better. Without the proper adapters, 1 percent of full scale is nearly impossible to achieve. Proper testing would involve putting the unit back into the machine and demonstrating agreement between the tests. With the Morehouse Adapters, reproducibility of better than 0.25 % is possible as demonstrated. To achieve these results the button load cell must not be damaged or have wear patterns. Those cells with wear patterns are going to have much larger errors. Morehouse adapters will improve those results as well, but our adapters will not turn a worn button load cell with a 5-10 % error into a cell with an error of better than 0.5 % of full scale. In general, we see improvements with a magnitude of 2 - 10 times better when using the proper adapters.
Conclusion:
Using Morehouse custom adapters to align the button type load cell significantly reduces misalignment error.
Figure 3 shows Morehouse Adapters for calibrating button load cells.
Figure 3. Morehouse Adapters
written by Henry Zumbrun
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