Assessment of a Column Type Six-Component Force/Torque Sensor by Theoretical, Simulation and Experimental Approaches

A multi-component force/torque sensor using strain gauges is applied to measure the static or dynamic forces and also the moments in all axis simultaneously. The applied column-type six-component force/torque sensor is composed of two flanges and a cylindrical elastic force-sensing element with a particular pattern of installed strain gauges. In this research the pattern of strain gauges on sensor is presented to electrically decouple each component of the applied loads. The theoretical model was developed for the presented pattern. Also the finite element simulation carried out with ABAQUS for whole model to evaluate the accuracy of the pattern in different situations. Furthermore, variety of load cases including the axial loads, the torsional torque and bending moments were applied to the prototype sensor to report the percentage deviations of experimental strains related to the equivalent theoretical model and the simulations. The results show that the actual values of the main diameter components of the calibration matrix not only are different from the theoretical values but also this matrix would not necessarily be diagonal. It is observed that the percent deviation of the simulation strains from theoretical values in all loading cases would be under 3%. As a prominent result, the minimum and maximum deviation between theoretical and experimental is related to shear force (Px) and bending moment (Mx) respectively by values of 0.27% and 8.12%.