Four Voltmeter Vector Impedance Meter Based on Virtual Instrumentation

In this paper, a digital vector impedance half-bridge meter based on virtual instruments is designed, implemented and tested. Here, not only the accuracy of the magnitude of the impedance is considered but, more importantly, its phase measurement accuracy. The meter utilizes a four-voltmeter method which is a basic modification of the well-known three-voltmeter method. The half-bridge is constructed with commercially available data acquisition (DAQ) board in the form of peripheral control interconnect cards incorporated in personal computers. The DAQ board is used only to acquire the voltages instead of using four separate voltmeters, while the excitation signal is produced by an integrated circuit signal generator. The main error in this method arises from the error in measuring the voltage values. Since the resolution of the DAQ board used here is 16 bits; expect that absolute errors due to A/D conversion will be around 0.305 mV for ±10 V range. Detailed error analysis of the method is included in the context of the paper. It is found that the errors in the impedance magnitude is fairly small and relatively less sensitive on the resolution of the voltmeters because of the relative measurements in the half bridge with a precise reference resistance. The original three voltmeter vector impedance meter has relatively large error in the phase especially in the small phase angles. To decrease the phase error to an acceptable range, one has to increase the resolution of the voltmeter appreciably, which makes them expensive. The other solution to reduce the error in the phase angle with less cost is to add a fourth voltmeter which acquires directly the small phase angles. In this case, it is found that, a much lower resolution voltmeter can be utilized while achieving an acceptable measurement accuracy of the impedance.