Automatic fast fitting of single Langmuir probe characteristics on RFX

An array of single Langmuir probes is routinely used in the RFX reversed field pinch for time-resolved measurements of edge electron density and temperature. In order to allow an automatic analysis of the large number of current-voltage characteristics, three different methods have been developed, which consider restricted subsets of data with voltage lower than an upper cutoff value. The first one. determines this limiting voltage by a neural network based technique, combined with criteria for the rejection of too noisy characteristics. In the second one a standard fitting routine is applied repeatedly to the data while varying the upper cutoff voltage. The third one consists of a numerical technique, where the best fit is obtained by minimizing a properly defined cost function. An error index is also calculated, which allows the reliability of the results to be easily estimated. The best results have been achieved using the last two methods.