Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements [Hardcover]

Robert B. Northrop (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 13, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0849378982 | ISBN-13: 978-0849378980 | Edition: 1

This new textbook and reference makes it easy to make an informed choice among sensors and signal conditioning systems. The books broad coverage includes: electrical and physical standards; analog signal conditioning; noise and coherent interference; DC and AC null methods; sensor mechanisms and applications; electrical measurements; digital interfaces; digital signal conditioning; measurement system design examples; and more. The few other texts available on this topic lack the breadth of coverage and fail to cover recent changes in standards. An Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements includes all the general information on instrumentation and measurements, as well as the technical details you need to apply your knowledge in the real world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

When the copy reached me and I browsed it, I said to myself, 'boy, this is good!'… .It is mandatory to start this review with a hearty and sincere congratulation to the author, Dr. Robert B. Northrop, for a thorough, solid and impressive piece that actually deserves to be called an opera, in the best sense of the old Latin meaning of the word, so much, that the word 'introduction' in its title appears as a too modest understatement and, perhaps, it ought to be deleted in future editions, to place the whole work in a proper and better perspective. …It is a must in any personal and/or engineering laboratory library, be it for advanced undergraduates, graduate students as also for the practicing professional and researcher. Besides, the book has a superb list of references for further study and is clearly written along with readable equations and figures.
-BioMedical Engineering OnLine, 2006 --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Northrop; Robert B. University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA,

Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: CRC-Press; 1 edition (June 13, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0849378982
• ISBN-13: 978-0849378980
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #433,689 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #57 in Books > Science & Math > Experiments, Instruments & Measurement > Measurement

More About the Author

Born in White Plains, NY in 1935, he majored in EE at MIT, graduating in 1956. At the University of Connecticut, he earned a MS in Electrical & Systems Engineering in 1958, and went on to get a PhD in physiology at UCONN in 1964. He joined the UCONN EE faculty in 1964, and in 1965, secured a 5-year graduate training grant from NIGMS/NIH to start one of the first Biological Engineering graduate training programs in New England. Throughout his career Dr. Northrop's research interests have been broad and interdisciplinary: He has worked on insect vision, electrofishing, exogenous closed-loop drug injection systems, mathematical models for the human immune system, biomedical instrumentation including non-invasive blood glucose sensing, and complex systems. He retired from the UCONN ECE faculty in 1997, and has continued to teach grad courses and write textbooks; he has written eight to-date. His current research interest lies in Complexity and Complex Systems. He lives in Chaplin, CT with his wife and a smooth fox terrier.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Useful Text and Reference, November 19, 2005

By 

P. Nagy "revreader" (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements (Hardcover)

An excellent sourcebook for students and practicing engineers alike, Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements includes all the general information on instrumentation and measurements, as well as the technical details you need to apply your knowledge in the real world. The book is very up to date which is also rare for a survey book. Worth using as a real reference, it will not just set on the bookshelf. There is no other text like it.

Excerpt: Knowledge of instrumentation is critical in light of the highly sensitive and exact requirements of modern processes and systems. Rapid development in instrumentation technology coupled with the adoption of new standards makes a firm, up-to-date foundation of knowledge more important than ever for those entering into almost every engineering field. Understanding this, Robert B. Northrop produced the best-selling Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements in 1997. The second edition continues to provide in-depth coverage of a wide array of modern instrumentation and measurement topics, updated to reflect advances in the field.

See What's New in the Second Edition:

Anderson Current Loop technology

Design of optical polarimeters and their applications

Photonic measurements with photomultipliers and channel-plate photon sensors Sensing of gas-phase analytes (electronic "noses")

Using the Sagnac effect to measure vehicle angular velocity

Micromachined, vibrating mass, and vibrating disk rate gyros

Analysis of the Humphrey air jet gyro

Micromachined IC accelerometers

GPS and modifications made to improve accuracy

Substance detection using photons

Sections on dithering, delta-sigma ADCs. data acquisition cards, the USB, and virtual instruments and PXI systems

Based on Northrop's 40 years of experience, Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements, Second Edition is unequalled in its depth and breadth of coverage.

Features

Expands its scope to encompass geophysical, chemical, and photonic measurement Describes low-noise system designs and covers digital signal processing and interfaces Includes clear examples along with challenging, classroom-tested problems

Purpose: This text is intended to be used in a classroom course for engineers that covers the theory and art of modern instrumentation and measurements (I&M). There is more than enough material to support two semesters' work. Thus, the instructor has the option of choosing those topics and the depth of coverage that suit his or her interests and curriculum. Due to its breadth, Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements, 2nd edition will also be useful as a reference for the practicing engineer and scientist interested in I&M.

Why have a classroom course in I&M? Over the past decade or so, in the U.S, many EE departments have discontinued classroom courses on the theory and practice of instrumentation and measurements. In this period, we have also seen the swift development of new and exciting means of measurement using new technologies, the adoption of new standards and, concurrently, the lack of development of a coherent educational base to support their understanding and use. Using an instrument in the laboratory is not the same as understanding the physical and electronic principles underlying its design and functional limitations. Clearly, there is now more than ever a need for classroom experience in the new I&M that will give students the necessary technical background to use and design sensors, signal conditioning systems and I&M systems. We feel that this text supports that need.

This text was written based on the author's 40 years of experience in teaching a classroom course (EE 230), Electrical Instrumentation, to juniors and seniors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Obviously, in 40 years we have seen the field of instrumentation and measurements evolve with the rest of electrical engineering technology. Due to the rapid pace of technical development, it has generally been difficult to find an up-to-date text for our Electrical Instrumentation course. After years of frustration trying to match a text to course content, I decided to write one that would not only encompass the "traditional" aspects of I&M, but also include material on modern IC and photonic sensors, microsensors, signal conditioning, noise, data interfaces and DSP.

Reader Background: Readers are assumed to have taken core EE curriculum courses, or their equivalents. The reader should be skilled in basic linear circuit theory (i.e., the reader has mastered Thevenin's and Norton's theorems, Kirchoff's Laws, superposition, dependent sources, and ideal op-amps, and should know how to describe DC and AC steady-state circuits in terms of loop and node equations). An introductory systems course should have given him/her familiarity with both time and frequency domain methods of describing linear dynamic systems characterized by ordinary, linear, differential or difference equations, including state space, Fourier, Laplace and z-transforms, transfer functions, steady-state frequency response of systems, and Bode plots. From physics or an EE course in electromagnetics, the reader should have a basic knowledge of electric and magnetic fields, inductance, capacitance, reluctance, etc. There should also be some familiarity with electromagnetic waves, Maxwell's equations, transmission lines and polarization. From a first course in electronics, there should be basic knowledge of BJTs, JFETs, diodes, photodiodes and their simple linear circuit models.

Scope of the Text: A major feature of Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements, 2nd edition is its breadth of coverage. Throughout the text, a high level of mathematical analytical detail is maintained. It is not a "picture book"; we assume that readers have already had contact with basic electrical instruments, including oscilloscopes and meters in their introductory EE and physics labs.

In the following paragraphs, we give an overview of the contents.

Chapter 1, "Measurement Systems," is introductory in nature. In it, we illustrate measurement system architecture and describe sensor dynamics, signal conditioning, data display and storage. Errors in measurements are discussed, including the meaning of accuracy and precision, limiting error, etc. The recent (1990) quantum standards adopted for the volt and the ohm are described, as well as other modern electrical and physical standards.

In Chapter 2, "Analog Signal Conditioning," we describe, largely at the systems level, the means of conditioning the analog outputs of various sensors. Op-amps, differential, instrumentation, auto-zero and isolation amplifiers are covered. Applications of op-amps in active filters, differential instrumentation amplifiers, charge amplifiers, phase sensitive rectifiers, etc. are shown. We also give practical considerations of errors caused by offset voltage, bias currents, input impedance, slew rate and gain bandwidth product etc. There is also a section on nonlinear signal processing with op-amps.

Noise and coherent interference in measurements are treated in depth in Chapter 3. A heuristic yet rigorous approach is used in which we define and use one-sided, noise voltage and current power density spectra to describe the effect of noise in instruments and measurement systems. Noise factor and figure are covered, and output signal-to-noise ratios are used to evaluate system noise performance. Examples are given of calculations of the noise-limited resolution of the quantity under measurement (QUM). Techniques are shown for the minimization of coherent interference.

The traditional topics of DC null measurements and AC null measurements are presented in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, respectively. Wheatstone and Kelvin bridges, and potentiometers are described in Chapter 4, and the major AC bridges used to measure the inductance, Q, and capacitance, D, are treated in Chapter 5. New material added to this chapter includes a description and analysis of the Anderson Current Loop method of reading sensor outputs.

A survey of sensor mechanisms is presented in Chapter 6. This is a large and substantive chapter covering a broad range of sensor mechanisms and types. Of special note is the introduction of certain fiber optic and electro-optic sensors, as well as selected chemical and ionizing radiation sensors. The Sagnac effect is introduced and the basic fiber optic gyro is described.

New material in Chapter 6 includes a description and analysis of sensors based on the giant magnetoresistive effect and the anisotropic magnetoresistive effect. Pyroelectric IR sensors are also introduced. The various means of measuring the rotation of linearly polarized light is presented, as well as a substantive section on photomultiplier tubes and channel-plate photomultipliers. Finally, a new section has been added on electronic noses which are used to sense volatile organic compounds.

In Chapter 7, "Applications of Sensors to Physical Measurements," a detailed analysis of mechanical gyroscopes, clinometers and accelerometers is given, including new material on micromachined accelerometers and gyros. The Doppler effect in ultrasonic velocimetry and laser Doppler velocimetry are covered. Also new in Chapter 7 is large section on the global positioning (GPS) system, a section on optical interferometry, and

an extensive introduction to spectrophotometry, sonoluminescence and surface plasmon resonance which are used for substance detection.

In Chapter 8, "Basic Electrical Measurements," the classic means of... Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reference and Textbook, April 27, 2000

By 

David Meadows - See all my reviews

This review is from: Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements (Hardcover)

Sensing/measurement technologies are presented for a very wide variety of effects. Covers enough of the details to be useful to a real engineer but does not force the reader to wade though every possible issue to find out what is really critical in a design area. This is the strength of the book and not very common especially for books of it's breath. The book is very up to date which is also rare for a survey book. Worth using as a real reference, it will not just set on the bookshelf.

3.0 out of 5 stars OK book, October 26, 2011

By 

J. Siu - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Introduction to Instrumentation and Measurements (Hardcover)

I bought this book hoping it would help me with my university course, but it is not useful for school yet.

NOW, I returned this book within the 30 days, in it's new condition without any marks or wear on it. Amazon took 50% off my refund by saying that it showed signs of use. This was not true as I only opened the book once and put it back in its original packaging. I called Amazon, and they said there's nothing they could do. There's no avenue to dispute their decision at all. The Amazon rep on the phone also told me that there's no channel to file a complain either. UNACCEPTABLE!