Spring Constant Measurement of Silicon Component in Watch Movement

Abstract

Recently silicon components have been applied in mechanical watch movements. Among them, the silicon hairspring is the most attractive due to the significant improvement of accuracy and performance compared with the traditional material. However, the current device in production is unable to measure the spring constant which determines the timekeeping accuracy of the watch. This paper presents a method to measure the spring constant of silicon components. The setup is based on Variocouple with a force sensor. The data processing is realized by Matlab. The result shows that the spring constant is calculated rapidly and accurately.