Improved Automated Current Control for Standard Lamps

As radiometric lamp standards improve, the need to set lamp current to specific values becomes more important. Commercially available power supplies typically provide 12 bit internal digital-to-analog logic which permits current control with a relative expanded uncertainty of about 1 part in 4096, corresponding to an expanded uncertainty of the current of about 2 mA at 8 A (in this paper, expanded uncertainties arc given as 2 standard deviations). For an FEL-type standard spectral irradiance lamp, this corresponds to a spectral irradiance difference of 0.12% at 655 nm. We have developed a technique using 16 bit digital-to-analog conversion which permits current control with a relative expanded uncertainty of about 1 part in 65536, corresponding to an expanded uncertainty of the current of about 0.1 mA at 8 A. This corresponds to a spectral irradiance difference of approximately 0.006% for an FEL lamp at 655 nm. We describe the technique used to achieve this improvement and we show data from a lamp demonstrating the effect of the improvement. We also describe the limitation provided by the uncertainty of the resistance of the current measuring shunt.