Does anyone have any knowledge of slip rings, specifically mercury contact slip rings for transmitting signal data?
I'm trying to build a test rig for a small scale manufacturing operation and need to monitor a number of sensor outputs on a rotating shaft.
Things I'm looking to investigate?

Units which can tolerate high rpm use up to 10000 rpm. Not sure this is possible so am also looking at gearing reductions also
Up to 4 channels
UK supplier, for the non-company amateur mere mortal experimenter.
Cost obviously.

Can anyone help, cheers

Liam Mc

Liam,

dsti.com is a company I've used in the past...very competent....may be of some use.

Alan B

Unfortunately i know nothing about your line of investigation, but it sounds interesting. What application is this for? Just curious.

As a R &D engineer one thing i can say are suppliers are more than happy to send free samples and test pieces to you should be able to get things cheap. I have blagged surprising things from suppliers, the bigger the company the easier the it is

Presumably sensors give analogue signal and mounted on rotating shaft?

How big is shaft? Possible to mount button cell to power an adc with a small transmitter, i can imagine tbe contacts introducing noise if you are dealing with small voltages.

Btw what is it you want to measure?

[Edited on 2/1/16 by 02GF74]

We have quite strict regulations regarding mercury use in our work due to our H&S interpretation of the regs. Also is you are talking about high revs that increases the vaporization risk - I would not be brave enough to go down this route!

As already stated can't you use wireless coms?

Vaporised mercury probably not a good thing, wireless would work fine I think?? I'll look into that

Need to measure 2 slowly changing analogue 0-5v signals

If the signals are changing slowly then you can filter out the noise. Even simply averaging say 20 readings would do that. There are DAQ modules available that would do the multiple reads and filtering automatically.
I do it on experimental work using Excel of all things and it works OK for infrequent use. The DAQ saves data as csv which I import to Excel in xy form. For each graph point there are 20 values I ignore the 2 highest and 2 lowest and average the remaining 16 and this gives very repeatable results. Not necessarily accurate but since they are repeatable they can be used for process control.

Cheers!