Sundareswaran,

It is not quite clear what exactly you want. How to properly ground Faraday cage?

Are reference electrode and ground plate should be connected? Rephrase please.

Reference electrode can be made by immerging a piece of (brushed with sandpaper) silver wire into bleach for 10-15 min. Such electrode does not serve long and must be re-brushed and chlorinated again. Much better to use Ag/AgCl pellet electrodes.

Dear Mr. Loganathan, we developed a all-solid-state reference electrode, which is simple to manufacture. You can download the paper in my profile or in the address http://www.j-sens-sens-syst.net/4/53/2015/. There is an excelent review about this subject: Guth, U., Gerlach, F., Decker, M., Oelßner, W., and Vonau, W.: Solid-state reference electrodes for potentiometric sensors, J. Solid State Electrochem., 13, 27–39, 2009. On the other hand, I didn't understand the question .... round plate for the faraday cage? I think that you may use the ground of an electrical outlet (wall socket). For this, you should solder a wire in your faraday cage and plug in it to ground of a wall socket. Well, I don't know if was this your problem, but I hope that answer helps you. Give us a reply about your doubt. Kind regards and good lucky.

Hello Julio Cesar Bastos Fernandes,

Thank you for the reply. I will go through it.

Regarding ground plate, Yeah in some setup i have come across the ground plate(copper ground plate) connected to the main electrical socket  which is supposed to be kept down the faraday cage at a minimum distance of 3 mm to reduce the noise.

This link http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12706846  find this well. Thank you once again

Hello Evgeny Petrov

1. How the reference electrode can be made?

2. How the  reference electrode and ground plate should be connected?

i found the reply from you for the 1 question.  Any suggestion for the 2nd?

Thank you.

Sundareswaran,

Tell the details about your equipment. Is that a standard Axon amplifier? if so, the reference electrode should be connected to the headstage - a little box to which you connect your glass electrode (headstage has 2 connectors - one for measuring electrode, another for reference electrode), Do NOT connect your reference electrode to the ground plate. You have to connect your Faraday cage to the ground plate. You have to connect your amplifier to the ground plate. Check the back panel of amplifier and seek a special screw with ground sign. Connect it with your ground plate. Usually the power socket has a ground line and ground plate should be connected to it for PROPER grounding. Talk to maintenance people in your building, and speak to electrician about how grounding should be done. 

 Hello Evgeny Petrov,

Yes , I am working on alpha omega systems(http://www.alphaomega-eng.com/productDetails.aspx?catid=13&id=66) . As far, i have never seen the connection of reference electrode from my head stage, i will check it. 

If my head stage don't have socket for reference electrode. which part  do i need to connect ? from the head stage , reference electrode should connect  to ?  Looking forward from you.

It is really helping me to sort out the issues. Thank you very much for your replies and explanation

Sundareswaran,

No, I have not been using this particular system, so I'm unable to help regarding details. I can only suggest a general things:

look at manual,

talk to someone who worked with this particular system

contact tech support

It's not clear exactly what you need, as it seems that you have two different issues...the first being how do you ground your faraday cage and all the electronics for your physiology setup, and the second how do you ground your amplifier headstage. If this is correct, the simplest way address the first point in grounding your physiology setup is to get or make a ground terminal block to mount directly (metal to metal contact) on your metal air table (TMC air table, for example). Attach a wire from your faraday cage (if it doesn't directly touch the air table) to the terminal block. Bring a grounding wire from every other piece of electrical equipment, your amplifier rack, and scope to that same grounding terminal point to avoid any ground loop currents. Then do as what was suggested above by Julio and directly connect all that to the ground of a standard outlet.  If you do this, in conjunction with using short shielded cables, you should be able to get a very low noise ephys rig.  For the second point of making a reference electrode, it would depend on your headstage and electrode, and I'm not familiar with your setup.  You may have an integrated unit with multiple recording electrodes and a reference built in.  For most patch clamp setups or tevc setups, you have a headstage that you attach your microelectrode to and you make or buy a Ag/AgCl ground electrode, ground pellet, kcal/agar bridge, etc.,  that attaches to your headstage or amplifier and goes into your bath chamber.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

Good luck!

Hello Jerry

Thank you for the reply. Your explanation founds well for my queries.