Electrical Transducers Part 1

This is again another blog entry to give electrical apprentice the link between the theoretical world taught at technical college and the practical world in which a few will be working in.


So what is a transducer?

Your lecturers will no doubt give you the answer that a transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into that of another. For the electrical apprentice this either means converting from or to electrical energy from another source of energy.

For many electrical apprentices that may later work in industry it is important to understand how transducer devices work, since having this knowledge may help to understand the operation of a particular process or machine. Knowing a process or machine operation is a key to effective diagnosis. Later I intent to, at a later date write a blog on fault diagnosis.

With so many different transducers available I thought I had better split the topic up into many different blogs so that you will not have to search through loads and loads of words on a single page.

Where I can think of an analogy, this will be included so as to assist in the explaination a specific transducer. I always find that electricity, because it cannot be seen is best explained using something more familar that is visible or at least easier to understand.
For example, what happens when you slowly close a tap/faucet on a water pipe? The action of closing the tap causes resistance to the flow of water, thus the flow slows down, eventually stopping. The tap/or faucet can therfeore be likened to the variable resistor found in electrical circuits in that it too offer resistance but this time to the flow of electricity and not water.

In part 2 I am going to be looking at knicker elastic and strain gauges.