The Merits and Demerits of Mercury Slip Ring

With the extensive promotion increasingly for slip ring applications , the demand for slip ring has also been added in different applications a great deal, which has more strict standard for technical requirements. Slip ring is made of brush and rotor mainly, it could transmit signal and power device between fixed part and rotating part under any rotation status for various of equipment.

No doubt, mercury slip ring, just take advantage of mercury as a conduction media for slip ring assembly. Mercury is the only one liquid metal could work under normal temperature status, this design creation can come true because of its feature and metal conduction. Mercury slip ring just seal mercury in the inside of slip ring, which combines with fixed part and rotating part together and use mercury to transmit current/signal without noise and high precision or reliability while operating. Therefore, the structure of mercury slip ring is not complicated compared other types of mechanical slip rings. From the dimension, its size is smaller a lot than mechanical one, this is one of the biggest advantage. The rotation of mercury slip ring is mainly for the friction among inside mercury molecules and sealed parts. So mercury slip ring has the main feature of lesser wearings, longer life time, higher working speed and maintenance free.

However, mercury slip rings also has some disadvantages, due to the big thermal expansion coefficient of mercury, then it can not operate in the high temperature. Normally, the temperature could not exceed 60 centigrade. Secondly, the cost is expensive because of high precision and mechanical sealed structure. On the other hand, mercury slip ring has strict demand for working environment and shock condition, otherwise, it must affect the life time greatly.