Choe Yong Son, a researcher at the Faculty of Physics, realized the computerization of an experiment device to measure the characteristics of glow discharge plasma.
Compared to the previous devices with analog meters, the computerized device is equipped with an embedded system and a touch-panel interface, which makes it possible to supervise and analyze experimental processes, and to display the results. It also ensures high accuracy in measurement and short time of measurement along with intuitiveness and effectiveness of experiments.
The device consists of a power supply, a probe voltage stabilizer, a triangular signal generator, a discharge current sustainer, a current-to-voltage converter, a voltage signal detector, a matching unit, and a computer. The main characteristics to measure are electron density and electron temperature. A linearly increasing voltage is applied to the electrostatic probe, which is placed in the discharge region, and the current to the probe is captured at a regular interval, in order to gain voltage-current measurement points of the probe.
These measured data are treated by 3-order spline interpolation and then by weighed polynomial method to obtain a voltage-current curve of the probe. Necessary features are to be derived from the characteristic curve, and these features are utilized to determine electron temperature and electron density. All these operations are automatically performed through its embedded system and touch-panel interface.
This device can increase the measurement accuracy of probe voltage and current by more than 20 times and, as a result, as many measurement points as possible are available. Therefore, we can eliminate scale errors, which were indispensable in the past, and decrease random errors down to below 0.5% (in analog meter: 4.2%). In addition, offline experiments may become possible by the combination of serial communication and network communication.
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