Author : Vaibhav Varne, Vasudev Shinde and Vijay Kamble

Providing product with good functioning and in least price is very necessary in today’s competitive market. Optimization approach is the best approach for industrial component which are having large number of design variables with more than one objective to satisfy for mobility of tomorrow. Load cells are transducers employed to measure force or weight. In the present investigation an attempt has been made on parametric optimization of pancake type strain gauge based load cell. The study focuses on finding critical dimensional parameters of the pancake type load cell and its effect on sensitivity and volume. The finite element method (FEM) has been applied at various levels of typical dimensional parameters of load cell. The response surface methodology (RSM) is employed for multi objective optimization of responses for maximizing sensitivity and minimum volume. Response optimizer with desirability function is found for optimum results of response surface methodology. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is conducted for analyzing contribution of each parameter on the performance of load cell.

Keywords: ANOVA, FEM, Load cell, RSM, Strain gauge, Sensitivity, Volume