DC Volt Meter

DC Volt Meter

A DC Volt Meter is an instrument used for measuring electric potential difference between two points in an electric circuit. DC Volt Meters give a numerical display of voltage by use of an analog-to-digital converter.

DC Volt Meters are made in a wide range of styles. Instruments permanently mounted in a panel are used to monitor generators or other fixed apparatus. Portable instruments, usually equipped to also measure current and resistance in the form of a multimeter, are standard test instruments used in electrical and electronics work.

Any measurement that can be converted to a voltage can be displayed on a meter that is suitably calibrated; for example, pressure, temperature, flow or level in a chemical process plant.

General purpose DC Volt Meters may have an accuracy of a few percent of full scale, and are used with voltages from a fraction of a volt to several thousand volts. Digital meters can be made with high accuracy, typically better than 1%.

Specially calibrated test instruments have higher accuracies, with laboratory instruments capable of measuring to accuracies of a few parts per million. Meters using amplifiers can measure tiny voltages of microvolts or less.

Part of the problem of making an accurate voltmeter is that of calibration to check its accuracy. In laboratories, the Weston cell is used as a standard voltage for precision work. Precision voltage references are available based on electronic circuits.

The sensitivity and input resistance of a voltmeter can be increased if the current required to deflect the meter pointer is supplied by an amplifier and power supply instead of by the circuit under test.

The electronic amplifier between input and meter gives two benefits; a rugged moving coil instrument can be used, since its sensitivity need not be high, and the input resistance can be made high, reducing the current drawn from the circuit under test.

DC Volt Meters often have an input resistance of 1, 10, or 20 megaohms which is independent of the range selected. A once-popular form of this instrument used a vacuum tube in the amplifier circuit and so was called the vacuum tube voltmeter, or VTVM. These were almost always powered by the local AC line current and so were not particularly portable.

Today these circuits use a solid-state amplifier using field-effect transistors, hence FET-VM, and appear in handheld digital multimeters as well as in bench and laboratory instruments. These are now so ubiquitous that they have largely replaced non-amplified multimeters except in the least expensive price ranges.

Most VTVMs and FET-VMs handle DC voltage, AC voltage, and resistance measurements; modern FET-VMs add current measurements and often other functions as well. A specialized form of the VTVM or FET-VM is the AC voltmeter. These instruments are optimized for measuring AC voltage. They have much wider bandwidth and better sensitivity than a typical multifunction device.

A DC Volt Meter measures an unknown input voltage by converting the voltage to a digital value and then displays the voltage in numeric form. DVMs are usually designed around a special type of analog-to-digital converter called an integrating converter.

DVM measurement accuracy is affected by many factors, including temperature, input impedance, and DVM power supply voltage variations. Less expensive DVMs often have input resistance on the order of 10 MΩ.

Precision DVMs can have input resistances of 1 GΩ or higher for the lower voltage ranges (e.g. less than 20 V). To ensure that a DVM’s accuracy is within the manufacturer’s specified tolerances, it must be periodically calibrated against a voltage standard such as the Weston cell.

The first digital voltmeter was invented and produced by Andrew Kay of Non-Linear Systems (and later founder of Kaypro) in 1954.

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