A Lecture on Accurate Inductive Voltage Dividers

Abstract

The United States Naval Academy is an undergraduate school with a successful engineering program. An underlying philosophy in the Systems Engineering Department is to emphasize hands-on experience while maintaining a solid theoretical background. To realize this principle, both teachers and students face many challenges. In this paper an attempt is made to teach students how to build a very accurate ac voltage divider with an uncertainty better than a part-per-million. This implies building a transformer-based divider. The idea is to bridge the gap between the state-of-the-art achievements in modern research and the undergraduate level of expertise. Several years ago a group of midshipmen built a voltage divider for a critical point experiment that was conducted in collaboration with a National Institute of Standards and Technology and NASA space shuttle program. In order for the students to be able to build a good transformer lots of coaching took place. This lecture is intended to introduce an engineering student into the art of precise voltage-ratio measurements.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2002
Accession Number
ADA574991

Entities

People

  • Andrew Koffman
  • Bryan Waltrip
  • George Piper
  • Svetlana Avramov-Zamurovic

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Circuits
  • Electrical Circuits
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Electricity
  • Electromagnetic Fields
  • Engineering
  • Engineers
  • Ferromagnetic Materials
  • Impedance
  • Magnetic Fields
  • Materials
  • Measurement
  • Resistance
  • Systems Engineering
  • United States
  • United States Naval Academy
  • Voltage Dividers

Readers

  • Electrical Engineering
  • STEM Education
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Hall-Effect Thruster