SPRING 2014

PAF KARACHI INSTITUTE OF ECONOMICS & TECHNOLOGY

College Of Engineering Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering

ELECTRONIC INSTRUMENTATION & MEASUREMENT LAB # 1: Study of balanced and unbalanced Wheatstone bridge

Class ID: _____________

Students Names and IDs: 1- ___________________________________________ 2- ___________________________________________ 3- ___________________________________________

Marks Obtained ______________ ______________ ______________

Signature of Lab Engineer: ______________________________ Remarks: ____________________________________________ Date: ____________________

Prepared by: Muhammad Amin Qureshi

SPRING 2014

Experiment # 1: Wheatstone Bridge

Objectives: Study of balanced and unbalanced Wheatstone bridge and its interface with opamp. Hardware: DC power supply Resistors 2 x 2KOhm, 1 x 5KOhm, Potentiometer 10 KOhm LM741 / LM10 IC or Instrumentation Amplifier IC AD62x (AD621) Digital Multimeter, Oscilloscope Breadboard, jumper wires

Basic Theory: Wheatstone bridge (or DC bridge) is a resistive bridge that uses the ratiometric technique to find an unknown resistance. This is done is the balanced condition of the bridge, that is, the voltage across terminals A and B is 0. The basic circuit is shown in figure 1. To achieve the balance condition, one of the resistors is variable and one is unknown, the rest should be equal. When the voltage between terminals A and B is zero, it means VA = VB.
Figure 1: Wheatstone bridge.

By looking at the schematic in figure 1, we can deduce that this is a series-parallel resistive circuit. When there is no current flowing through the Galvanometer, the following statement is true: VR1 = VR3 and VR2 = VR4
Dividing both equations, we get,

Using Ohms law,

Since, currents I1 = I2 and I3 = I4

This equation can be re-arranged for any unknown R in the bridge. This is called the balanced operation of DC Bridge. This form is rarely used because there is no practical application related to it. However, Wheatstone bridge was very important in forming the foundation of instrumentation. In instrumentation, Wheatstone bridge is used to sense the small changes in an unknown resistance due

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to the change in some physical variable associated with the resistance value. Such a resistor is practically a sensor, which changes its resistance with the change in temperature, pressure or light etc. The resistive sensors might be Resistance Temperature Detectors (RTD), thermistors, strain gauges, Light Dependent Resistors (LDR) etc. For this, we have to replace one or more resistances in the bridge with our sensor. We might have a fractional voltage output on A and B. This voltage needs to be amplified most of the time. When using unbalanced bridge based transducers, amplification and signal conditioning is somewhat necessary because the output of unbalanced bridge is often quite small, that is, not more than tens of millivolts. Operational amplifiers are the integral building blocks of modern instrumentation. These are used in different configurations for different purposes. In this lab we will briefly look at the basic operational amplifier (op-amp) schemes used in instrumentation. LM741 and AD62x ICs will be used for the experiment purposes. In general, we have differential voltage output from our transducers. For this, we have to use Differential Amplifiers, which forward the difference of the two inputs with or without amplification. Instrumentation amplifier is an advanced scheme of differential amplifiers. Instrumentation amplifier consists of buffers fed from terminals A and B, a differential amplifier and an optional output inverting or non-inverting amplifier. This scheme can be implemented using general op-amp ICs like LM741 or LM10. But there are several monolithic Instrumentation amplifier IC packages available too. AD621 is a Figure 2: A generic Instrumentation Amplifier scheme. common IA that can be used in this lab.

Procedure:
1. Create a DC bridge as shown in Figure-1 with these values: R1 = 1K, R3 = 10K, R2 = Potentiometer = 10K with a supply voltage of 5VDC. 2. Remember to measure each resistance with the Digital Multimeter (DMM), as the actual value can be different from the rated value.

3. The potentiometer value should be estimated first. For this, measure the unknown resistance with the Digital Multimeter (DMM) and record its value. Use the equation above to find the resistance of potentiometer (R4) at which the bridge should be balanced. Choose a potentiometer which can accommodate this calculated value in its range.

SPRING 2014 4. Now power up the circuit and turn the potentiometer arbitrarily and try to achieve the bridge balance, that is, voltage between terminal A and terminal B should be ZERO. If you are unsure of terminals A and B, ask the lab engineer. 5. When the desired voltage becomes zero, the equations written above are valid. You can easily find the unknown resistance using the relation described in above discussion. 6. Repeat this procedure for different resistances and record the values in a table.

Results: