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Lab Report - Strain Gauge Essay

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ES180 : Technological Science 1
Strain Gauge
Laboratory Report

By Akash Sherchan
Student I.D. #: 1124433
University of Warwick

Summary
The strain gauge laboratory session had a lot of aims and one of the main aims was to provide us with experience in using circuits based on operational amplifiers and examine the characteristics of these circuits when they amplify DC signals. Another aim was to also investigate the use and characteristics of resistive strain gauges. The overall objective was to understand the how these widely used transducers are used and how they behave. This will be done through custom pre-built electronic circuits which will then be used to amplify signals from a resistive strain gauge when weighed down with …show more content…

This supplies power to the PCB. Then, with wires, connected the output of the potentiometer to IN1, making sure that PIN 1 of the potentiometer goes to PIN 1 of IN1. The variable potentiometer lets us set a specific input voltage to the non-inverting amplifier. 1.3 After assembling the circuit we switched the power on. We then joined the Digital Volt Meter (DVM) so that it will measure the input voltage Vi and adjust the input to about 0.5V. Using a second DVM as shown in figure 3 we could measure the output voltage V0. We repeated the procedure to find the maximum negative output voltage and the minimum input voltage needed to achieve this. 1.4 We took a total of 10 readings within the range of input voltages and plotted a graph.

2) Inverting Amplifier
Gain = V0 / Vi = -R4 / R3
Gain = V0 / Vi = -R4 / R3
2.1 Again we had to set up an Operational-amplifier, this time an inverting op-amp using figure 6. We were again told to use resistors to make a gain of about 15, but R3 had to be higher than 150 kΩ. I used 330 kΩ for R3 and 4.7 MΩ for R4. The predicted gain was 14.24 using the equation:

2.2 Next we constructed the circuit putting the resistors inFigure 5
Figure 5 to place in the Inverting amplifier part of the test board. Similar to before we connected the variable potentiometer to the inverting amplifier inputs (IN2).
2.3 Like before we measured the range of the output and input voltages

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