Criterion-Based Design and Evaluation of a Parallel-Plate Electrostatic Balance Mass Comparator

This paper presents a criterion-based framework for the design and evaluation of a parallel-plate electrostatic balance mass comparator (PEBM). The framework establishes sufficient conditions for strict monotonicity of the transfer characteristic, a necessary condition for unique code generation on the weighting network, and conditions guaranteeing monotonicity preservation, absence of missing codes, and a maximum inter-code deviation of one bit. The weighting network is defined over 2^N − 1 discrete steps for N weights, and a comparator dead-band condition is incorporated into the design criteria. A systematic design procedure is formulated that links the geometric and electrical parameters of the balance to measurable code-level properties. The theoretical criteria are validated through numerical simulations of the transfer characteristic and code sequence. An experimental protocol based on cross-validation against a reference balance is defined for the quantitative characterisation of the prototype. The contribution of this work is a set of explicit design criteria, bounds, and verification procedures that make the code behaviour of an electrostatic mass comparator predictable and testable.