Design and Implementation of Potentiometer-Based Nonlinear Transducer Emulator

Transducers are normally with nonlinear responses over the entire of a physical parameter they are meant to measure. A potentiometer can be regarded as a linear differential resistive transducer for measuring linear (or angular) movement. In this work, an analog is suggested to make a potentiometer catwalk in order to emulate an actual transducer with its nonlinear response represented as a concatenation of linear segments with known slopes. Each segment of a given slope is implemented by a potentiometer to emulate the variation of input ranging over a given input section of the input. Ultimately we get as many circuits as the number of segments the nonlinear response is made of. Next, an input circuit is used to decide on a range the input is falling into for making use of appropriate potentiometer circuit with the help of a digital selection circuit. The circuit is simulated using MULTISIM to verify that variations in the input voltage give rise to an output voltage that emulates very closely the envisaged nonlinear response. The utility of this work lies in emulating purpose-built real world transducers.