Electrical methods for force measurement – A brief survey

The paper presents a dozen of classical methods (resistive, inductive, capacitive, piezoelectric, electromagnetic, electrodynamic, magnetoelastic, galvanomagnetic, vibrating wires, microresonators, acoustic and gyroscopic) for the electrical measurement of force. Each method is followed by a short description of the principle involved, underlining its main advantages and disadvantages. A few relevant aspects concerning materials, technologies, circuits and characteristics are briefly presented, together with some numerical results (mainly, sensitivity coefficients). In a synoptic table the typical measurement ranges of these 12 methods are shown. Finally, a complex application is described, in which a force standard machine combines four of these measurement principles.