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Capacitive tuning is working!

A project log for PyPPM: A Proton Precession Magnetometer for all!

A device for conducting Nuclear Magnetic Resonance experiments at Earth's field

bradley-worleyBradley Worley 10/05/2014 at 02:143 Comments

After bodging in the correct connections to bring the -2.5V rail up (or down?) on the PyPPM 2.1 board, I finally got digitally selectable capacitive tuning working in the firmware and software.

The idea behind tuning is to place a capacitance in parallel with the sensor coil such that the resultant LC tank circuit resonates at a desired experimental frequency. Most devices have used manually adjusted capacitor banks or variable caps, but the PyPPM uses a digital control scheme that provides 64k unique capacitance values.

Check it out:

If everything goes well, I'll be able to run a field test soon of the non-adiabatic pulse program with and without tuning to show the performance in a real-world setting.

~ Brad.

Discussions

A. M. Aitken wrote 10/05/2014 at 17:23 point
I was expecting a boost in the tuned area as well as a reduction in the rest of the spectrum but I'm not seeing that in the demo. The resistance of the switch is fairly high, but it's not higher than the coil. Do you have an estimate of how wide your bandwidth is at earth field?

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Bradley Worley wrote 10/05/2014 at 17:46 point
Hey Marvin. Actually, if you compare the intensities of the untuned spectra before and after tuning was used (at the beginning and end of the video, respectively) you'll see that tuning boosted the signal enough to rescale the vertical axis about 2x.

If you're asking about the Q-factor of the tank circuit, that's not a number I've worked out in any exact way...

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A. M. Aitken wrote 10/05/2014 at 22:12 point
I suppose I'm asking about Q in a round about way. I was expecting a signal boost of more than x10 and I wondered if the bandwidth was very wide. I do need to revisit Q maths.

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