Electronic – Floating voltage measurements

adcvoltage measurement

Is there a very cheap way to measure several voltage differences of 0.1V to 10V (to ~1% accuracy at 10Hz, say), where each pair of measurement terminals may be tens of volts away from the ground of the circuit that needs the measurements?

As far as I can see, one either isolates each analogue signal before it reaches the ADC (using one isolating amplifier per channel – not cheap), or has one serial ADC per channel (not cheap — I was hoping to multiplex a single ADC), each floated at the appropriate level, with optoisolation of the ADC output.

Are there any other strategies? Isolated DC/DC power supplies are themselves not enormously cheap (~£3/unit) so ideally I would want something that doesn't require a power supply floated at the level of each measurement input. Is this possible?

Best Answer

An answer in another question sparked an idea for this.

You maybe could use a high-side current monitor circuit like INA168:

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This allows the input voltage to have a common-mode offset of up to 60 V and will output a ground-referenced 1-10 V signal for your inputs, with an appropriately chosen RL. You may even be able to get a gain of less than one, though I haven't read the datasheet closely enough to know if this is guaranteed to work.

If you can reduce the voltage range to be measured to something like 0 - 1 V instead of 0 - 10 V (say with a simple resistor divider), you can use the somewhat similar INA193, which allows up to 80 V offset, but has a fixed gain of 20 V/V.

If you can't reduce your input voltage range, you could try building your own circuit with a similar topology but lower gain. Your accuracy would probably be reduced due to inability to match components as well as TI can do in a single chip.