Does this Strain Scaling button do anything? or is it not a button at all? Channel setup>Bridge>Strain

Does this Strain Scaling button do anything? It flashes briefly when I click on it.

I would half expect to see a transfer function option appear for converting microstrain to force or some other unit that still depends on shunt cal scaling.

Some transducers in our lab still offer Shunt Cal targets

Hello Lemmy,

thank you for reaching out to us. 

The Strain scaling button is not a functional button, per-se, it is more of a tab button. It operates the same way as, for instance, the General, Info, Connector, Edit sensor, Scope, FFT, Scaling, By two points, or By function buttons, meaning, pressing on it will change the tab.

For example, pressing the General button will display the general parameters of the Amplifiers, that you can set and change yourself. Pressing the info button will open a new tab, with the amplifier's information written as text.

If you choose Stain as the physical quantity of the Sensor, the only scaling option you can use is Strain scaling, and so this tab is automatically pressed, thus the Strain scaling button is consistently blue, and pressing it will not change anything. 

Since your chosen Physical quantity is strain with units um/m, the scaling will change from mV/V to um/m. To correctly scale the input vs output, you need to insert the Gage factor, k and the Bridge factor. The bridge factor depends on the selected bridge mode under the amplifier settings, whereas the k-factor is usually found under the specifications of a strain gage. Choosing the correct Gage type, meaning, not operating with a custom Gage, will automatically select the Bridge factor, and enable you to make scaling more accurate by choosing the proper material of the gage and nu.

You can find more information regarding the scaling in the bridge-operations-for-strain-gauges manual, that contains the Strain Gage configurations table on page 23, as well as the Pro training; Strain Measurement Using Strain Gage Sensors, where we measure the Strain and Stress of the tuning fork.

Best regards,

Pika