IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement

The purpose of this paper is to propose an evanescent field-scanning millimeter-wave microscope to bridge the frequency gap that currently exists in probe microscopy. The method is supported by the use of a six-port-based reflectometer operating at 35 GHz in association with a microfabricated resonant micro stripline probe. The simplicity of the method makes it suitable for an industrial context a... View full abstract»

We propose here a nondestructive electromagnetic (EM) near-field test bench for both EM compatibility and susceptibility of circuits. This setup permits both the collection of the near field and injection without contact of a disturbing EM field, all through a probe. Exhaustive characterizations of probes are undertaken via simulations and experiments. According to their design, they are supposedl... View full abstract»

Some effects of physical parameters, such as temperature, on electromagnetic emission or susceptibility of electronic circuit boards are nonnegligible and can be enforced by new integrated complex electronic structures. This paper describes experimental improvements proposed on near-field and radiated-mode test setups, including the temperature parameter. New experimental investigations and method... View full abstract»

In this paper, the capability of ultra-wideband (UWB) sensor arrays for tomographic imaging of electrically large objects in 2-D and 3-D environments is presented. One of the main concerns when imaging extended real objects is the capability of the system to correctly reconstruct the object cross-section electric properties. An imaging method using a UWB multifrequency bifocusing (UWB-MFBF) operat... View full abstract»

The results of Chilean wine classification based on the information contained in wine aroma chromatograms measured with a fast GC analyzer (zNosetrade) are reported. The aroma profiles are the results of the derivative of frequency change responses of a surface acoustic wave (SAW) detector when it is exposed to a flux of wine volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during aroma measurement. C... View full abstract»

This paper studies the feasibility of using solid-state magnetoinductive probes for detecting and imaging steel reinforcing bars embedded within prestressed and reinforced concrete. Changes in the inductance of the sensor material are directly proportional to the strength of the measured magnetic field parallel to the sensor. Using a square coil of 300 mm times 300 mm times 2.5 mm, 10-mm rebars ca... View full abstract»

The light flicker effect is one of the most complex phenomena in the power quality field. It involves voltage fluctuation shape, lamp behavior, and eye-brain activity. As a first approach, the cause of light flicker was modeled in terms of voltage amplitude modulations, with a rectangular or sinusoidal shape. This is the main reason these modulated voltage waveforms have been adopted to evaluate t... View full abstract»

Large-scale distributed measurement systems are the object of several applications and research. The goal of this paper is to develop, by employing global positioning system (GPS) receivers, measurement techniques that are suited to the continuous monitoring of the electrical quantities in distribution networks in terms of synchronized phasors. The proposed measurement procedures, differently from... View full abstract»

The development of an acoustic measurement system for multimode air-coupled excitation and detection of micrometer-scale cantilever structures, which are, for example, used in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMSs), is detailed and reported for the first time. The source of noncontact vibrational excitation is a pulsed acoustic field generated by an air-coupled transducer. In the experimental sys... View full abstract»

A novel method to determine the noise parameters of receivers or devices under test (DUTs) for on-wafer microwave noise measurements is presented. An iterative technique is utilized, and fast convergence is achieved by the proposed impedance selection principle. This proposed method reduces the parameter variations in the conventional methods. The impact of the impedance difference on noise parame... View full abstract»

In this paper, a monolithic complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) autocompensated sensor transducer for capacitive measuring systems is newly presented. The proposed converter is compact and robust to integrate in capacitive measuring systems. The proposed autocompensated sensor transducer is attractive due to the fact that a digitized signal is produced without realizing the analog-to-di... View full abstract»

Experimental investigations of structures under impact loads are normally carried out by means of drop-weight testing rigs, which are often tailor made, and require sensors for fast transient measurement of mechanical quantities (namely, force, displacement, velocity, and absorbed energy). Since these tests are quite expensive, time consuming, and, often, not repeatable, the sensors must provide r... View full abstract»

A technique for time and frequency transfer over an asynchronous fiber optical transmission control protocol (TCP)/IP network is being developed in Sweden by SP Measurement Technology together with STUPI. The technique is based on passive listening to existing data traffic at 10 Gb/s in the network. Since the network is asynchronous, intermediate supporting clocks will be located and compared at e... View full abstract»

Porous media modeling is relevant in several applications, such as agricultural engineering, where soil compaction analysis requires the estimation of soil transport properties. For example, the prediction of root growing patterns and their environmental impact is usually measured by analyzing soil fluid infiltration capacity and water retention. Recently, tomographic images have been used in nond... View full abstract»

This paper deals with the measurement of the R, L, and C parameters of passive components in nonsinusoidal conditions. Since these components usually work with voltage and current waveforms that are different from sinusoidal ones, nonsinusoidal characterization has to be made. The importance of nonsinusoidal characterization of passive components is highlighted through the analysis of two case stu... View full abstract»

An accurate goniometer was constructed, being a part of a system that is designed for the measurement of reflecting properties of surfaces. It can be used to orient a surface of the sample under test arbitrarily with respect to the observing direction and the direction of the shooting light beam. The high performance (revolution angle uncertainty equal to 0.1deg), which is required as a specificat... View full abstract»

In this paper, we report on nonlinearity compensation for a solid-state fiber bragg grating (FBG) sensor interrogation system based on an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) device. A lookup table with calibration data is used to improve system linearity. A reduction in the absolute value of the measurement error from 120 mustrain or 15degC to 4.8 mustrain or 0.6degC, respectively, is experimentally d... View full abstract»

This paper deals with the development of an open design platform for explorative cell mechanotransduction investigation. The produced setup combines scanning probe microscopy (SPM) techniques and advanced robotics approaches, allowing both prolonged observations and spatial measurements on biological samples. As a result, an enhanced force probing method based on scanning microscopy techniques and... View full abstract»

The aim of this paper is to develop a system for reconstructing an image of two parameters, e.g., temperature and body composition, in the same region of a living body. In this paper, a new multifunctional sensor for simultaneous measurements of the ultrasonic and electrical properties of an object is proposed. The proposed sensor, which uses a pair of piezoelectric ceramic transducers, measures n... View full abstract»

In eddy-current displacement sensing, existing techniques mostly involve a high-frequency sinusoidal carrier wave and deal with the demodulation of this signal. In this paper, we give a new design idea. We use switching circuits, in which the sensing coil is included as an inductor and driven by a switching voltage, and some baseband sensor output is readily available. Thus, no explicit demodulati... View full abstract»

Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory provides a solution to fuse multisensor data, which are presented in a hypothesis space comprising mutually exclusive and exhaustive propositions and their unions. The fusion result is a description of the proposition with the values of support, plausibility, and uncertainty interval. However, in some applications, numerical values of a continuous function, instead of a... View full abstract»

This paper presents a digital directional coupler (DDC) that separates forward- and backward-traveling waves on a transmission line. Based on two independent wideband measurements of voltage and current and on frequency-domain digital wave splitting using a fast Fourier transform (FFT), the DDC is a versatile device for direction separation. A practical procedure is described for the calibration o... View full abstract»