Strain Gauge Output
Bridge output for a strain measurement — quarter, half, or full bridge.
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The engineering
A 1000 µε signal on a quarter bridge with GF 2 is only 0.5 mV/V — 5 mV at 10 V excitation. That's why lead resistance, thermal EMFs, and amplifier offset dominate strain work, and why half and full bridges buy you signal and temperature compensation at once.
The linear formula is the small-strain approximation every datasheet uses; past a few thousand µε the quarter-bridge nonlinearity term starts to matter.
Where this math comes from
Lord Kelvin noticed in 1856 that stretching a wire changes its resistance — then filed the fact away for eighty years. Edward Simmons at Caltech and Arthur Ruge at MIT independently built the bonded wire gauge in 1938; Ruge's version, glued to a shaker-tested water tank model, became the products that launched strain measurement as an industry.
Wartime aircraft testing made the technique universal, and the foil gauge (Paul Eisler's printed-circuit etching, repurposed in the 1950s) is what you're bonding today.
- 1856Lord KelvinDiscovers resistance changes with strain.
- 1938Edward Simmons & Arthur RugeBonded wire strain gauge, invented independently at Caltech and MIT.
- 1952Saunders-Roe / foil eraEtched-foil gauges bring precision manufacture to the bridge arm.
See the full timeline of the math behind every calculator →
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