Piezoelectric Charge Amplifier

The PCA-100 charge amplifier converts the charge-based signal from a piezoelectric transducer into a current or a voltage signal. This current or voltage signal is transmitted to the processing electronics via a standard 2-wire or 3-wire transmission cable. The current modulation technique allows transmission over a distance of up to 1 km. A galvanic separation unit is required for this configuration . The electronic circuitry of the PCA-100 signal conditioner is incor-porated into an aluminium enclosure. The charge amplifier provides high-pass and low-pass filters and an optional integrator to give a velocity output. Fur-thermore, RFI filters protect the input and output against radio-frequency interferences and other elec-tromagnetic influences.