Realization of the farad from the dc quantum Hall effect with digitally-assisted impedance bridges

A new traceability chain for the derivation of the farad from dc quantum Hall effect has been implemented at INRIM. Main components of the chain are two new coaxial transformer bridges: a resistance ratio bridge, and a quadrature bridge, both operating at 1541 Hz. The bridges are energized and controlled with a polyphase direct-digital-synthesizer, which permits to achieve both main and auxiliary equilibria in an automated way; the bridges and do not include any variable inductive divider or variable impedance box. The relative uncertainty in the realization of the farad, at the level of 1000 pF, is estimated to be 64E-9. A first verification of the realization is given by a comparison with the maintained national capacitance standard, where an agreement between measurements within their relative combined uncertainty of 420E-9 is obtained.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, 3 table

Development of real-time cellular impedance analysis system

The cell impedance analysis technique is a label-free, non-invasive method, which simplifies sample preparation and allows applications requiring unmodified cell retrieval. However, traditional impedance measurement methods suffer from various problems (speed, bandwidth, accuracy) for extracting the cellular impedance information. This thesis proposes an improved system for extracting precise cellular impedance in real-time, with a wide bandwidth and satisfactory accuracy. The system hardware consists of five main parts: a microelectrode array (MEA), a stimulation circuit, a sensing circuit, a multi-function card and a computer. The development of system hardware is explored. Accordingly, a novel bioimpedance measurement method coined digital auto balancing bridge method, which is improved from the traditional analogue auto balancing bridge circuitry, is realized for real-time cellular impedance measurement. Two different digital bridge balancing algorithms are proposed and realized, which are based on least mean squares (LMS) algorithm and fast block LMS (FBLMS) algorithm for single- and multi-frequency measurements respectively. Details on their implementation in FPGA are discussed. The test results prove that the LMS-based algorithm is suitable for accelerating the measurement speed in single-frequency situation, whilst the FBLMS-based algorithm has advantages in stable convergence in multi-frequency applications. A novel algorithm, called the All Phase Fast Fourier Transform (APFFT), is applied for post-processing of bioimpedance measurement results. Compared with the classical FFT algorithm, the APFFT significantly reduces spectral leakage caused by truncation error. Compared to the traditional FFT and Digital Quadrature Demodulation (DQD) methods, the APFFT shows excellent performance for extracting accurate phase and amplitude in the frequency spectrum. Additionally, testing and evaluation of the realized system has been performed. The results show that our system achieved a satisfactory accuracy within a wide bandwidth, a fast measurement speed and a good repeatability. Furthermore, our system is compared with a commercial impedance analyzer (Agilent 4294A) in biological experiments. The results reveal that our system achieved a comparable accuracy to the commercial instrument in the biological experiments. Finally, conclusions are given and the future work is proposed

Advanced electrode models and numerical modelling for high frequency Electrical Impedance Tomography systems

The thesis discusses various electrode models and finite element analysis methods for Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) systems. EIT is a technique for determining the distribution of the conductivity or admittivity in a volume by injecting electrical currents into the volume and measuring the corresponding potentials on the surface of the volume. Various electrode models were investigated for operating EIT systems at higher frequencies in the beta-dispersion band. Research has shown that EIT is potentially capable to distinguish malignant and benign tumours in this frequency band. My study concludes that instrumental effects of the electrodes and full Maxwell effects of EIT systems are the major issues, and they have to be addressed when the operating frequency increases. In the thesis, I proposed 1) an Instrumental Electrode Model (IEM) for the quasi-static EIT formula, based on the analysis of the hardware structures attached to electrodes; 2) a Complete Electrode Model based on Impedance Boundary Conditions (CEM-IBC) that introduces the contact impedances into the full Maxwell EIT formula; 3) a Transmission line Port Model (TPM) for electrode pairs with the instrumental effects, the contact impedance, and the full Maxwell effects considered for EIT systems. Circuit analysis, Partial Differential Equations (PDE) analysis, numerical analysis and finite element methods were used to develop the models. The results obtained by the proposed models are compared with widely used Commercial PDE solvers. This thesis addresses the two major problems (instrumental effects of the electrodes and full Maxwell effects of EIT systems) with the proposed advanced electrode models. Numerical experiments show that the proposed models are more accurate in the high frequency range of EIT systems. The proposed electrode models can be also applicable to inverse problems, and the results show promising. Simple hardware circuits for verifying the results experimentally have been also designed