What Is Weighing Equipment?
Weighing Equipment is a generic term for devices used to measure weight, mass, or volume. It includes household weighing instruments such as scales, cooking scales, and measuring cups, as well as industrial weighing instruments such as trucks, cranes, and tanks, but generally refers to instruments used to weigh samples with high precision in chemical analysis and the like.
Types of Weighing Equipment
There are two types of weighing instruments: physical balances and electronic balances. Currently, there are two types of electronic balances in common use: load cell (electrical resistance) and electromagnetic (parallel electromagnetic force). For this reason, electromagnetic balances are mainly used in fields where high accuracy is required, such as analysis.
Instruments used to measure the volume of liquids include female flasks, which are mainly used to measure a fixed volume, female cylinders, pipettes, and syringes, which are used to collect a fixed volume and transfer it to another container, and burettes, which are used at the time of titration.
There are many types of pipettes used to measure relatively small amounts of liquids, each with different applications and precision. Pasteur pipettes, and transfer pipettes are not suitable for precise measuring, but they are used for pipetting and dispensing where accuracy is not required because they are simple to use.
In situations where high accuracy is required, a whole pipette (volumetric pipette) or a female pipette, which is less accurate than a whole pipette but allows greater flexibility in the volume of samples collected, is used. These pipettes are used with a rubber pipettor or safety pipettor to prevent chemicals from getting into the mouth when aspirating.
Micropipettes with disposable pipette tips are widely used for measuring minute amounts of liquid, mainly 1.0 mL (= 1000 µL) or less, and are sometimes referred to as pipettors. There are a wide variety of pipettors, including those that can pipette electrically, those that can set liquid volume digitally, and multi-channel pipettors.