Mk3.5: a modular, multi-frequency successor to the Mk3a EIS/EIT system

This paper describes the Sheffield Mk3.5 EIT/EIS system which measures both the real and imaginary part of impedance at 30 frequencies between 2 kHz a nd 1.6 MHz. The system uses eight electrodes with an adjacent drive/receive electrode data acquisition protocol. The system is modular, containing eig ht identical data acquisition boards, which contain DSPs to generate the dr ive frequencies and to pel form the FFT used for demodulation. The current drive is in three sequentially applied packets, where each packet contains ten summed sine waves. The data acquisition system is interfaced to a host PC through an optically isolated high speed serial link (RS485) running at 2 Mbaud (2 Mbits s(-1)). Measurements on a saline filled tank show that the average signal to noise performance of the system is 40 dB measured across all frequencies and that this figure is independent of frequency of measur ement. These results suggest that the current system is 10 dB better in abs olute terms than the previous Sheffield (Mk3a) system.