A high voltage method for measuring low capacitance for tomography

Low capacitance measurement is involved in many industrial applications, especially in the applications of electrical capacitance tomography (ECT). Most of the low capacitance measurement circuits employ an ac-based method or a charge/discharge method because of high sensitivity, high resolution, and immunity to stray capacitance; and its excitation or charge voltage are not more than 20 V. When ECT techniques for large industrial equipment such as blast furnaces or grain barns are explored, the existing methods for measuring low capacitance have some limitations. This paper proposes a high excitation voltage ac-based method for measuring low capacitance to improve the resolution of measurement. The method uses a high excitation voltage of several hundred volts and a transformer ratio arms as the C/V transducer. Experimental results indicate that the new method has a resolution of 0.005 fF, a good stability (about 0.003 fF over 4 h) and linearity (0.9992).