Lab Zero Finding the Gain of an Instrumentation Amplifier

Prepared By: David Ploessl Matthew Eichstaedt

ME 3720-Mech Systems Lab University of Wisconsin-Platteville Dr. Kraemer

1. Introduction This lab is designed to calculate the gain of an AD620 instrumentation amplifier. An amplifier circuit was set up on bread board number 6 and attached to the NI Elvis input software. The voltage gain was determined by taking readings of the input and output voltages. The calculated experimental gain was then compared to the gain as it is presented in the AD620 Instrumentation Amplifier chip data sheet. This lab demonstrates how an amplifier works and shows how a voltage gain is computed and can then be used and understood in further experiments.

2. Analysis The AD620 instrumentation amplifier is used to amplify an input signal that can be defined while in the linear range as Vamp=G* Where Vamp is the amplified voltage, G is the gain, and difference between the input voltage signals. is the

The gain is determined by the following equation G = 1 + (49400 /RG) As found in the AD620 instrumentation chip data sheet. RG is the measured value of the resistor in the amplifier circuit. The measured value of RG is 99.8 Using the measured value of RG, and the AD620 instrumentation chip data sheet, the gain is then calculated to be 495.99. The experimental gain should relatively close to this value.

3. Procedure System Setup: 1. Open the Labview program and create a blank VI 2. Make it so the VI can read two analog input channels 3. Create controls that will control the time, frequency, and maximum and minimum voltages. 4. Create two waveform graphs for each analog channel 5. Add functions to calculate the mean voltages from both channels. Sample block and front diagrams are shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

Figure 1: Sample Block Diagram

Figure 2: Sample Front Panel

6. Connect bread board #6 to NI Elvis and turn on. 7. Run the Labview program and pause. Take note of the mean voltages from both channels.(See Figure 3) 8. Repeat as many times as desired. 9. Graph the Mean Delta Voltage vs. the Mean Voltage Amp 10. Make a line of linear regression to come up with slope of the line. The slope is the experimental gain. (See Figure 4)

4. Results Mean DelV Mean Vamp 0.00502785 2.07839 0.00966894 4.14038 0.0150835 7.044058 0.0196279 9.0787 Figure 3: Data Points
y = 486.34x R = 0.9985 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 0.005 0.01 0.015 0.02 0.025

Mean DelV vs Mean Vamp

Figure 4: Voltage gain graph Our experimental gain had a 1.98 % error as compared to the calculated theoretical gain as shown by the following equation %error = abs(theoretical-experimental)/experimental *100 Possible sources of error in this calculation could have come from using a small sample size. Other errors could have been due to the calibration of the multi-meter voltage readings.

5. Conclusion In conclusion to this experiment it is found that the gain of the AD620 instrumentation amplifier is found to be 486.34 as compared to a calculated theoretical value of 495.99. This data was collected using NI Elvis and the software program Labview. The collected data was inputted into Excel and the gain was collected by the slope of the linear regression line of Mean DelV vs. Mean Vamp.