Improving the Accuracy of Digital Unbalanced Impedance Bridges

This article presents an automatic digital unbalanced impedance bridge for comparing two-port impedances: R-R, R-C and C-C. The bridge consists of a two-channel digital source of voltage sinusoidal waveforms supplying the bridge arms and a three-channel precise digitizer, by means of which the complex ratio of the source output voltages and the relative bridge unbalanced voltage are determined. The hardware implementation of the bridge is based on a relatively inexpensive universal data acquisition (DAQ) card by National Instruments, USB-6281, which contains, among others, a multi-channel 18-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and two 16-bit digital-to-analog converters (DAC). Thanks to the new approach to the bridge operation algorithm, consisting in the use of the interpolation method in the comparison process, the influence of the accuracy of the measurement of the bridge unbalanced voltage and some bridge parasitic admittances on the uncertainty of the impedance comparison were minimized. This simplifies the measurement procedure and shortens its execution time. The obtained results confirmed that a relatively simple digital unbalanced bridge can compare impedance standards with an uncertainty of less than 10 −5 . By reducing the requirements regarding the uncertainty of the measurement, and thus its execution time, the presented bridge supplemented with impedance sensors can be used in many areas of industry.