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PCB Piezotronics Facility Tour

Save the date!

A facility tour of the PCB Piezotronics, Inc. headquarters has been scheduled on Thursday, May 16, 2019 from 8:30 - 10:30 am. 

Location

PCB Piezotronics, Inc.
3425 Walden Avenue
Depew, NY 14043

Registration

There is no additional fee to participate in the tour, however registration to attend will be required. Registration is limited to the first 100 attendees and is on a first come, first served basis.

Please note that in order to clear attendees for a plant tour PCB requires the following information: country of citizenship and passport number/birth certificate to verify.

Transportation

Buses will be available from the Hyatt Regency Buffalo Hotel to the PCB headquarters. Travel time from the hotel to the plant is approximately 20 minutes. 

Airport Note: The Buffalo Niagra International Airport is located 10 minutes from PCB. If you have a Thursday afternoon flight, you are welcome to check out of your hotel and bring your luggage to PCB. Secure luggage storage will be provided while you are on the tour. Transportation will be provided to the airport or back to the hotel. 

Tour Details

The tour will include stops at the following stations:

Machine Shop - A growing product demand made PCB look further into expanding our machining capabilities.  The search for methods to support the increase product demand lead to the purchase and renovation of a neighboring building. Now known as the PCB Machining Center (PMC), PCB is home to one of the largest privately-owned machine shops in Western New York, comprised of 53,000 square feet of total machining capacity. Operating on a 24-hour, 6-day a week basis, approximately 7,000 manufactured parts are machined daily to support the needs of PCB sensors, signal conditioners, and associated accessories. 

The tour will take you to CNC lathes and mills, wire EDMs, machining and turning centers, automated aqueous cleaning equipment, plastic injection molding presses, and the FMS horizontal machining cell. 

Vibration Division, Assembly of Triaxial Accelerometers - You will tour the production floor viewing the assembly process of our miniature triaxial accelerometers, some of the smallest available in the world. You will have an opportunity to review the internal construction, subassemblies, and wiring just as if you were the assembly technician. Our training cells where employees learn soldering, workmanship standards, and special processes will also be discussed.

PCB® Crystal Production - PCB® produces quartz and ceramic crystals for its various sensor technologies. The properties and advantages of each type of crystal will be highlighted. The technology used to produce these crystals will be discussed during this tour.

Laser Calibration Standard - Primary calibration of accelerometers using a laser interferometer will be demonstrated in this tour. PCB®’s system is A2LA accredited to ISO 17025 and provides a measurement uncertainty as low as 0.2% at 100Hz. The system is used to calibrate both in-house and customer-supplied accelerometers when the application demands high calibration accuracy. The system is composed of a beryllium air bearing shaker, heterodyne HeNe laser, precision signal generator, and data acquisition system

Hopkinson Bar/PneuShock™ Calibration to MIL-STD-810 - Shock accelerometers measure the high-amplitude, short-duration accelerations often associated with transient events. Since an accelerometer might not be perfectly linear, that is, its sensitivity might vary with the input amplitude; these accelerometers can introduce errors into shock measurements, increasing uncertainties. Calibration can reduce these uncertainties if tests are performed at levels typical of the actual measurement. However, the most commonly used calibration techniques in calibration laboratories use electrodynamic shakers. Because typical calibration-quality shakers are incapable of achieving the acceleration levels of shock, alternate means were developed for secondary (comparison) shock calibration of accelerometers.

Two types of shock calibration systems are used at PCB: a Pneumatic Exciter system for day-to-day work and a Hopkinson Bar for more detail analysis. This tour illustrates both.

  • The Hopkinson Bar is a fully automated system for calibrating and verifying high g range shock accelerometers and for testing of small, lightweight specimens, at acceleration levels from 1,000 to 100,000 g. A triggered lifting pin releases a specially shaped, air-driven, plastic or metal projectile, which impacts one end of the Hopkinson Bar. This action generates a compression wave, which imparts high-amplitude acceleration to a test accelerometer or specimen that is mounted on the opposite end of the bar. As a reference, a pair of strain gauges is bonded to the middle of the bar and measures the propagation of the compression wave. The system verifies accelerometer performance characteristics such as sensitivity, frequency response, zero shift, linearity, and survivability.
  • The PneuShock™ Model 9525C works by pneumatically forcing a projectile to impact an anvil to which the sensor under test and the back-to-back reference accelerometer are mounted. It provides shock inputs from 20g to 10,000g through a pneumatically generated impulse. This enables accurate and consistent sensitivity calibrations at high acceleration levels. The system can be used manually in stand-alone mode or fully computer-controlled.

 

62nd Annual Fuze Conference

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