Transducers

[darrenh]

Can someone shed some light on how transducers work? Your help is much appreciated

 

[bob]

Light = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transducer

 

[ggunn]

Can someone shed some light on how transducers work? Your help is much appreciated

There are scads of different types of transducer. Can you narrow it down a bit?

 

[darrenh]

I'm thinking like on a trolley of a electric crane. How does it convert the
Mechanical energy into a electrical energy to read the location of the crane. Something of that nature just curious.

 

[ggunn]

I'm thinking like on a trolley of a electric crane. How does it convert the
Mechanical energy into a electrical energy to read the location of the crane. Something of that nature just curious.

I don't know anything about cranes, but one type of transducer is simply a magnet attached to a rotating wheel that swings by an electromagnetic pickup (similar to an electric guitar pickup, which is also a transducer) on every rotation. The pickup and the moving magnet are the transducer in this case; they generate an electrical pulse on a wire from the pickup every time the wheel goes around and some sort of electronics connected to the wire counts those pulses and does something with the information.

 

[GeorgeB]

I'm thinking like on a trolley of a electric crane. How does it convert the
Mechanical energy into a electrical energy to read the location of the crane. Something of that nature just curious.

+1 on ggun's response. Each manufacturer designs their own system, usually. I've seen encoders, resolvers, potentiometers, and on small systems, magnetostrictive. For safety reasons, I've seen only absolute measurement devices used; with incremental, resetting or homing would be necessary on power failure.