At the heart of every electronic weighing instrument is a device called a load cell, which takes a mechanical force and turns it into an electronic signal. Anytime something needs to be weighed in commerce – whether it’s lunch meat at a deli counter, or a truck crossing a bridge with a weight limit, or medicine being formed into pills with exactly the right proportions – you can bet there’s a load cell inside that scale or balance, making the measurement possible.
But before selling their products, companies that manufacture load cells need to ensure that their devices really do perform as intended. Most countries have a set of legal requirements that manufacturers must follow. The regulations that are adopted by many countries outside the U.S.* have as their basis a recommendation made by an intergovernmental organization called the International Organization of Legal Metrology (OIML) (link is external).
Recently, a revised recommendation for the metrological regulation of load cells – referred to as R60 – was published by OIML. It’s the first update to the recommendation in almost 20 years.
Source: Worth the Weight: New International Guidelines Published for Manufacturing Load Cells | NIST
