These are real data sets. To see them you should download the visualization program VIZ then download a .diel file below using the usual right-click&save. They only work together. The .diel files are pretty much useless without VIZ and VIZ is pretty much useless without a .diel file. They're not useless together.
Install VIZ on your PC by unpacking the installation download (that's often automatic) and double-clicking on setup.exe and doing the usual installation process. As far as I can tell it works on all normal XP, Vista, and 7 computers. Then run VIZ (the installation should put a link at the top level of your start menu, apologies if that's intrusive, or you can go to your Programs directory and click on visualize.exe itself). VIZ will start by asking you for a file, you should browse to the .diel file you downloaded from this page. Then pick something to plot from the pulldown, click plot and you should be in business. VIZ is hopefully self-explanatory and there is no way to do damage so feel free to play with the buttons. VIZ never alters the original .diel file (or anything else on your computer) and it only saves files one at a time using an ordinary file browse dialog, so you can't even write a bunch of files by mistake.*
Since these are real data files they are often imperfect. Some measurements were cancelled part way through (as sometimes happens in real life) so the data files are cut off. In fact I think that in one file here I unplugged the computer as the measurement was in progress to make sure that the data gets written to disk if the program is terminated unexpectedly. Also, not all the measurements were made with the same version of GADD. One version difference is that older versions didn't store the script as part of the output (.diel) file. Remember please, any file may contain more than one measured value, especially temperature and time are often also measured. So check out the pull-down on the panel immediately after you load the file.
- All 5 examples (+1) in a zip file
- Fine China Heating, Ac, Dc, Freq.Diel C&D(temperature, frequency, AC, DC)
This is my favorite one. It generated the images that made the movies you can see in the "Movies" section of this website. This is a measurement of C&D of some ferroelectic using an Agilent 4284A LCR meter and a cold finger controlled by a Lakeshore temperature controller. C&D are measured as a function of temperature, frequency, AC and DC fields. The interesting thing here is to look at the surfaces when the axes are (temperature, frequency) and when they are (AC,DC). It's called "fine china" because of the lovely bowl shaped surfaces in the AC/DC view. There's a jump in the temperature at one point caused by the controller hiccuping (not my program and not my hardware), like I said, this is real-life data.
- Poly+Diodes+Res GADD.diel eps*(AC, frequency)
This is an example of using the specialized GADD hardware This is a measurement of the complex permittivity of a standard test fixture I have. The DUT is a 3.3nF polypropylene capacitor with back-to-back 1N914 diodes in series and a resistor in parallel. The measurement is made from .2Vrms to 140Vrms and from 10Hz to 10kHz. You can notice that the capacitance (real part) is small at low voltage because the diodes are not turned on and rises to the value of the capacitor at higher AC voltage. On the other hand the imaginary part (the dielectric loss) peaks out when the diode is mostly in its transition zone. The the AC voltage is low the loss is just from the diode junction, reasonably low, and when the voltage is high the drop across the diodes is small compared to the voltage across the capacitor so the loss is also relatively low then. You'll notice that the system is capable of applying 140Vrms to a 3.3nF capacitor at 10kHz, which is non-trivial current by electrical characterization standards.
- CpD.diel C&D(temperature, frequency)
This is included here to show what the system looks like when doing the same sort of routine thing other dielectric spectroscopy systems can do. Although this system has the virtue of doing it with your equipment, temperature stages and meters you may already own, or that I can write a new driver for. And with this system you can pretty much do what you want in terms of sequencing the measurement process. Exactly the same system can be a measurement over temperature, an aging experiment, a way to do a quick frequency sweep of something at room temperature, or something nobody has thought of yet.
- Pyro.diel pA(time,temperature)
This is an example of using the system to measure pyroelectricity. The current measurement device was an old HP4140B pA meter. A script can be written for a temperature ramp, temperature stepping with defined settling precision, or "free run." This was done in free run. Every 0.1 degrees from 300 to 250 three current measurements were made, 0.5 seconds apart. The noise is interesting, it was part of the temperature stage. The single big spike was from somebody intentionally jiggling the cable because he didn't believe me when I said that current measurements in the pA range need to be done carefully.
- pe heating.diel pe(temperature)
This is just a sequence of pe (polarization/electric field) measurements made as a function of temperature.
*Not a legal declaration, this is just a statement of how I wrote it and my experience about how it behaves.