This week is all about our electrode test station. We’ve made significant safety improvements and improvements in the sensitivity of our high voltage measurements. The first is the installation of our fancy new Interlock Chassis, which allows us to remotely shut down the power supply. It also automatically cuts power to the high voltage power supply in the event that one of our safety interlocks are removed. We already had the latter functionality, but now it and the remote control feature are all integrated into one dedicated box of Safety.
The second improvement has multiple benefits. One of the issues identified in our 10/3/2016 run was the high voltage ground wire. Like a BNC cable, our high voltage cable has an inner signal wire in addition to an outer grounding wire. We discovered that the ground wire, if disturbed during a measurement, could affect the voltage we measure from the high voltage power supply. We decided to constrain the ground wire to a Teflon tube that I fixed to the inside of our safety interlock clamshells with generous amounts of epoxy. In addition to isolating the ground wire for more precise measurements, its placement inside the clamshell provides another layer of protection from high-voltage in the scenario of voltage breakdown. It’s a win-win! -RR
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