Monday, 11 February 2013

Work summary of week 2


In the first week, we got the Lissajous figure using Matlab as shown in the second picture in the first blog. The area of the shape surrounded by the blue line represents the work done by the DBD plasma reactor in one period. However, the shape is not smooth enough. This is because the output signals were interfered by some interference such as noise. To calculate the area accurately, we should smooth the curve first. Thus, in the second week, we wrote a program to take the average of every 200 points as a sample and use the new chosen samples to draw the Lissajous figure. As shown in the follow picture, the curve became much smoother than the last one.
 
 
The next problem needed to be figure out was how to obtain the frequency of the signal. The shape of the output signal is similar to the sin wave. Firstly, our thought was to set a fixed voltage value as reference. When this value appeared a third time, we could take this time interval as the period. Then the frequency could be achieved by the equation f=1/T. However, in a short time interval, the voltage values were extremely close to each other. Therefore, it was difficult to calculate the period accurately by this way, and we gave up this method. Secondly, we wanted to get a fitted curve by the cftool in the Matlab. Afterwards, we did not use this ready-made cftool, because we preferred to write the program to achieve the frequency. Finally, we discussed this troublesome problem with our supervisor Dr. Tu. And he told us we could use fast fourier transform (fft) to cope with it. Then, we searched lots of information about fft from the internet and tried to compile the program. Unfortunately, it did not work. It might be something wrong with the program.
 
Thus, the main task of the next week is to get the frequency by fft method.

No comments:

Post a Comment