Stability improvement for coil position locking of joule balance

The relative vertical position locking precision between the exciting and suspended coils is an important uncertainty for the Planck constant traceability in joule balance. In order to improve the relative vertical position locking precision, several stability experiments are conducted. The stability characteristics of the suspended and exciting coils are measured using a six-axis laser interferometer system; meanwhile, the effectiveness of the active vibration isolation table is measured using a vibration measurement sensor. The piezoelectric ceramic actuators with PID controller are used to compensate the relative vertical displacement drifts while a six-axis laser interferometer system is used to measure the positions of two coils. Experimental results show that the relative vertical position is stably locked.