Digital Precision Engineering Scales

Digital scales are used in so many different industries, such as the food processing industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the cosmetics industry, the plastics industry, the semiconductor industry, the chemical industry, and precision engineering industry, there are needs for many specialized design features that must be engineered into an industrial scale depending on how the scale is being used.

One need that must be met in many industries is for a digital weighing scale to be able to survive extremely high shock loads. The most common transducer to be found in an electronic industrial scale is a strain gauge load cell. The load cell is made of a very carefully shaped block of metal that bends in a predictable way when a force is applied to it. Several strain gauges, resistors that are made up of flat metal wire that is folded up many times, are placed in various places on the load cell. When the load cell bends, the resistance of the strain gauge changes and a converter uses this change in resistance to report the amount of force that is being applied to the load cell. Many scale manufacturers use aluminum load cells in their industrial scales.

A number of precision engineering company, it is imperative that industrial scales be able to survive several different types of environmental hazards. In the chemical industry, drums and tanks of caustic chemicals may need to be weighed. However, the chemicals may eat away at the metal body of the electronic scales and even at the very important load cells inside. An excellent solution to this problem is to coat the body of the digital scale with a polyamine epoxy coating which is resistant to corrosion by even extremely caustic chemicals.

Weight data collection is a need throughout industry, meaning that industrial scales must be able to communicate with computers. Several precision engineering services are utilized to solve this problem. USB is also a very good option for scale-computer communications. However, often, a scale and the computer that it must communicate with are found in different parts of a factory.