• Current Optics and Photonics
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.683-691
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• 2023

A typical terahertz time-domain spectroscopy system requires large, expensive, and heavy hardware such as a lock-in amplifier and a function generator. In this study, we replaced the lock-in amplifier and the function generator with a single sound card built into a typical desktop computer to significantly reduce the system size, weight, and cost. The sound card serves two purposes: 1 kHz chopping signal generation and raw data acquisition. A unique software lock-in (Python coding program to eliminate noise from raw data) method was developed and successfully extracted THz time-domain signals with a signal-to-noise ratio of ~40,000 (the intensity ratio between the peak and average noise levels). The built-in sound card with the software lock-in method exhibited sufficiently good performance compared with the hardware-based method.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.24-28
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• 2014

A lock-in amplifier was proposed for capacitive sensor applications. This amplifier was based on a general-purpose microcontroller and had only a charge amplifier as analog circuits. All the other functions of lock-in amplifier except for the charge amplifier were implemented with firmware and the internal resources of the microcontroller. A rectangular signal, generated by the microcontroller, was used in a sensor-driving signal instead of a conventional sinusoidal signal. This makes it possible that the phase comparison circuit in the lockin amplifier is made with analog-to-digital converter, a timer and an interrupt controller. Using the oversampling method and the rectangular driving signal, we can make it easy to implement the peak detection function with software and sample the peak-to-peak signal at charge amplifier output. A charge amplifier was proposed to cancel out the base capacitance existing in capacitive sensors structurally. The experimental results show that the lock-in amplifier operating in the supply voltage of 3.0 V cancels out the base capacitance and has good linearity.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.46-54
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• 2008

In this paper, a low-cost impedance spectroscopy system(LCISS) suitable for modeling the electrochemical power sources such as fuel cells, batteries and supercapacitors is designed and implemented. Since the developed LCISS is composed of simple sensor circuits, commercial data acquisition board and LabVIEW software, a graphic language with powerful HMI(Human-Machine Interface), it is expected ta be widely used in substitution of the expensive EIS instruments. In the proposed system, the digital lock-in amplifier is adopted to achieve the accurate measurements even in the presence of the high level of noises. The developed hardware and software is applied to measure the impedance spectrum of the Ballard Nexa 1.2kW proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack and an equivalent impedance model is proposed based on the measurement results. The validity of the proposed equivalent circuit and the developed system is proven by the measurement of the ac power losses of the PEM fuel celt stack by the ripple current.