Electrical – Strain Gauge – Wheatstone bridge DRIFT

instrumentation-amplifierstrain-gagetemperaturewheatstone-bridge

enter image description hereI have a 350 ohm bridge with 04 fixed resistors, later on one of them will be replaced by a strain gauge sensor. In the meantime I am trying to understand where the drift is coming from.

This bridge is connected to an in-amp with 1000x gain.
In order to calibrate the bridge and unbalance it (so I can have, say 1V output at the in-amp output) generally I use a very high resistor (around 500k ohms) in parallel with one of the resistors on the bridge.
These 350 resistors are 0.02% tolerance and 0.2ppm/C. The opamp is a AD8571 (extremely low drift and offset).

Unfortunately I have been struggling for months with a drift that shows in several different ways:

  1. Temperature – Only by blowing some hot air briefly, the output varies +/-10mV
  2. When the voltage output is increased by any external factor that is removed afterwards, it never goes back to its initial value
  3. There is a voltage drift without any temperature change, I managed to have a very precise temperature sensor mounted on the top of the circuit to confirm.

All components are very high quality, spec'd for this particular application, low drift, low offset and really expensive. I do not know whatelse I can do to get rid of this annoying drift, unpredictability and lack of repeatability.

Best Answer

You may be seeing thermal EMFs, as well as thermal drift of the resistors.

Blowing hot air with a hot air gun is not the way to test a circuit like that. Use a proper environmental chamber with a fan inside and control the air flow over the board (maybe with a bit of foam). You may have to wait an hour or two for the temperature to stabilize. The hot air gun will lead to wrong conclusions. You may see dynamic changes that even out as the gradients disappear.

Do not have anything on the board that dissipates a lot of power (I assume you are doing this).

Leaded resistors can be a bit less prone to change from external mechanical forces. Try flexing the board a bit and see if your reading changes. Chances are this is not your problem, but it's worth a check.