ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,306,251, issued on May 20, was assigned to PHOENIX CONTACT GMBH & Co. KG (Blomberg, Germany).
"Contact-monitoring device" was invented by Peter Scholz (Brakel, Germany), Marius Fischer (Paderborn, Germany) and Christian Reinhold (Hameln, Germany).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A contact monitoring device for monitoring an electrical contact having a first contact state and a second contact state includes: an oscillator circuit for generating an excitation signal; a coupler including a signal input and a signal output, the oscillator circuit being connected upstream of the signal input in order to apply the excitation signal to the coupler...