Handbook of Force Transducers

This handbook could best be described as a "potpourri" of ideas and applications in the field of measurement, instrumentation and transducers. Among them, Strain gauges - Wheatstone bridges - Force transducers - Mechanical testing - Electrical measurement - Virtual instrumentation are dominating the story, like a red thread, a root of all facets treated by the author. It is addressed mainly to students, technicians, engineers, researchers and other people desiring to broaden their knowledge area and get new specific information. The book's table of content is rather balanced, going from simple to complex in 21 chapters. Most delicate subjects, such as force feedback, force control, force vision, smart/intelligent force transducers, virtual measurement, are gradually presented and properly explained. It's worth mentioning the author's particular care for terminology. An example: distinguish between weighing cells - load cells - force transducers. Then, for measurement units: when expressing force or loading weight in grams (kilograms), the correct unit is grams-force (kilograms-force)! More than 200 illustrations (colorful, complex, suggestive, and informative) and 260 bibliographical references (a quarter from which belonging to the author) bring a plus of value and strength to this spectacular and unique work about various applications with strain gauge force transducers (SGFTs) and their characteristics. Drawings, originally executed with a pencil, ruler and compass, have been redesigned with modern programmes like Catia and, where needed, using CorelDraw "insertions". If, for various subjects the "historical" SAP IV had been used in the era of punched cards, later they were processed with ANSYS (with the "right-hand rule" for its OXYZ axes system), adding a special application for depicting strain diagrams directly upon the "active" surfaces of elastic elements (EEs). At the beginning of the new millennium, we switched to computer aided design (CAD), combined with finite element analysis (FEA), which facilitates modeling and parametric optimization of the EEs for SGFTs. In a multidisciplinary world, with interconnected specialties, the imagistic correlations adopted in this handbook resulted in ingenious solutions, in quite complex applications. It is to be noted the uniform figuring of the strain gauges, connected in Wheatstone bridge after their bonding on the flexible elements of single- or multi-component SGFTs, observing the adopted colour convention: red - increasing resistance for (mechanical) tension (T) and blue - decreasing resistance for compression (C). Perhaps one could object to somehow "overloading" certain pictures. An explanation could be the author's desire to "squeeze" more information into individual images. This could be a great advantage especially for young people, who prefer "concentrated" information and quick learning. Both online and printed editions enjoy and benefit from the "kaleidoscopic" (and often "encyclopedic") content of the book.