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The shear beam load cell is a transducer that converts load to an electrical signal, usually by the use of four or more strain gauges in a Wheatstone bridge configuration.

The strain gauges are mounted in a section of the load cell sensor body that is specifically designed to to be strong in bending but sensitive only to shearing force, and this usually results in a load cell of higher stifness when compared to a bending beam design.

The shear beam load cell often takes the form of single cantilever design, which makes it sensitive to bending moments. For this reason, the shear beam load cell is most often used in sets of three or four, supporting platforms such as floor scales or supporting frameworks such as those found in silo and tank instalations.

Multiple load cell outputs are wired in parallel and their outputs are then summed to give the total load result. In the case of floor scales and other applications where the load can be positioned off-center, then it may be necessary to trim the outputs of the individual load cells so that the load result is the same, regardless of load position on the scale. Such devices are known as summing junction boxes or trimming boxes, and can be found in the OTHER PRODUCTS selection on the Mantracourt website.

The output of such load cells is usually in the region of 2 to 3 mV/V at full load, even after summing, which makes them suitable for use with any of Mantracourt's strain gauge amplifiers, digitisers and controllers.