Kitchen and Bathroom Scales.

You may decide to check your weight this morning (always better in the mornings!) – your electronic scales have one or more strain gauge-based loadcells in them.

You may have cereal or bread for breakfast – this represents several strain gauge applications:

1. Tractor ploughing (draft) forces to optimise the depth.
2. Seeds can be placed with force measurement for optimal planting depth.
3. Combine harvesters use loadcells to predict, and therefore avoid, jamming of the threshing drum. Downtime of these machines is very expensive.
4. Grain is sometimes weighed dynamically, directly on the harvester using a deflection plate mounted on a loadcell, which can provide an entire yield map of the field for targeted fertilising. Grain is also weighed in the grain bin or trailer.
5. Grain is stored in silos mounted on strain gauge loadcells.
6. Cereal (and almost every other recipe-based product) is made in a factory where each ingredient is weighed.
7. Cereal is packaged by weight, not volume!

During breakfast you may decide to weigh the recommended amount of cereal using an electronic kitchen scale. When you pour milk on your cereal remember that it’s weighed during the milking process using a strain gauge sensor. You may buy it in volume (pints or litres), but it’s processed in weight.