Techniques to measure tension in wires or straw tubes

We discuss two different ways of measuring the tension in light wires and straws. The first technique uses an operational amplifier to subtract out the oscillating driving voltage mixed in the output voltage, which also has the signal. The isolated signal is amplified and displayed in an oscilloscope. In the second technique, an analog switch routes the oscillating voltage to a wire for a fraction of seconds, and then switches off the voltage. As the voltage is turned off, the induced signal from the wire is routed to an amplifier-rectifier circuit for a fraction of a second to measure the signal size as a function of the driving frequency. The first technique fits well to measure a single wire, while the second one fits well to measure many wires, 16 in our case, at a time.

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Author Seog Oh Physics