Study of a Modified Differential Inductance Measurement Circuit as Position Transducer of a Power Cylinder

A power cylinder is essential equipment in process industries. Since it acts as a final control element with its piston positioned by a positioner having an input signal from a controller, the indication of actual position of the piston becomes very much important in analyzing the actual operation of a process. In this paper, a modified differential inductance measurement circuit has been proposed to design the position transducer of a power cylinder. The design of the circuit, along with the principle of operation, has been described in this paper. The operation of the proposed circuit has been experimentally studied, and the experimental results are reported in this paper. The proposed transducer has been found to have very good linearity and repeatability.