Results from a Digital Tension Measurement Instrument for Multi-Wire Particle Detectors

 Currently, one of the most common means of assessing wire tensions in physics detectors is to individually pluck each wire and use a laser to measure its natural frequency. Our new instrument uses a recently developed method that places an AC current and DC bias on alternating wires, inducing vibrations in the wires between them. The instrument reads out the voltage of each vibrating wire while sweeping through AC frequencies, and uses the resonance peak that occurs at a wire's fundamental frequency to determine that wire's tension. The automation and parallelization built into the instrument allow it to greatly exceed the speed at which tensions are measured using the common method. In this talk, we present results from a successful tension measurement of a physics detector that contains thousands of individual wires.