Answers to the need of higher orders of magnitude for pressure, force and torque measurement explained on the example of wind energy

With the further advance in industrial applications the task of measuring high pressure, high forces and high torque values gets into the focus. The paper demonstrates that this is especially true for wind energy. Pressure measurement above 1 kbar has been a quite academic topic until about 15 years ago. Today diesel injection requires working pressures of 2 kbar and more and e.g. water jet cutting is heading toward working pressures of even 7 kbar. Regarding force while civil engineering is a rather traditional field of measuring high forces, e.g. energy generation up to 5 MN or railroad vehicles up to 2 MN always generate new tasks. Wind energy again is the main driver for the need to measure high torque values. For all these reasons HBM offers pressure transducers up to 15kbar, force transducers up to 20 MN and torque transducers up to 300 kNm, values nobody needed until only a short time ago. This need for new orders of magnitude comes with new requirements in terms of lifetime as well as accuracy at the same time. Therefore an evaluation of pick-up principles concerning an optimum solution is very much on the agenda. This paper describes the needs in wind energy, the solutions and gives examples for transducers, measurement setup and calibration possibilities.