Pulse Electric Field
The problem: Control a high voltage power supply charging a capacitor, which reaches a set voltage level to discharge the capacitor across a spark gap to a treatment chamber in a non-current limited circuit. ~ Emily Bender, Graduate Research Assistant; Dr. Jayem Subbiah, BSE and Food Science Dept.
The solution: Using an Arduino control circuit to allow the high voltage power supply to charge the capacitor in cycles, that when the voltage was discharged across the spark gap the researcher and equipment could observe the discharge and log the data before the next discharge event occurred. Another function of the circuit was to allow a the researcher to set the number of discharge cycles without having to manually stop the circuit when the target number of discharges happened.