Sensors, Instrumentation and Measurement

Full course description

Sensors systems are part of many aspects in daily life. They are present in almost every home, office or industrial plant and play an essential role in optimizing and automizing industrial processes to increase efficiency, decrease pollution and create a more sustainable and circular economy. In this course, the elements of measurement systems are further explored: transducers, amplifiers, filters and analog-to- digital converters. The different sources of error (noise, interference, offset, non-linearity, aliasing) that limit the performance of such systems are discussed. Methods of analytically determining the corresponding detection limits are presented, and in particular how errors can be referred to the input of a system and represented by equivalent voltage/current sources. Several techniques for mitigating measurement errors are studied in detail, such as the use of feedback, filtering, synchronous modulation, chopping, auto-zeroing, dynamic element matching etc. In order to fully exploit an instrument's potential, you need to be aware of its limitations, correctly interpret the measurement results and be able to arrive at well-balanced decisions relating to the purchasing, repairing, expansion or replacement of electronic equipment. You learn how to identify the correct instrumentation to address specific circularity and sustainability issues in problem-based learning sessions, analysing for example, how waste-stream monitoring and feedback loops can reduce the waste production in an industrial process line.