Ch.3-3.

Temperature
measurement

EET 238
Instrumentation
 Contents

Objectives
Introduction
1) Thermocouples
2) Resistance temperature detector (RTD)

2
 Objectives

By the end of the presentation, you will able

to:
 Explain the operation principle of thermocouple
 Explain the principle of operation of resistance
temperature detector

3
 Introduction
 One of the most frequently measured physical
quantities is temperature. The need to measure
temperature arises in just about every field of
engineering.
 This subsection is devoted to introducing two common
temperature sensors
– the thermocouple and
– the resistance temperature detector (RTD)

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 1. Thermocouples
 It is formed by the junction of two dissimilar metals. This
junction results on an open-circuit thermoelectric
voltage due to the Seebeck effect.
 As junction J1 of an
iron/constantan thermocouple is
exposed to the temperature to be
measured, a thermoelectric
voltage is observed across J2
and J3, which is dependent on
the temperature at junction and
the Seebeck coefficient of the
5 thermocouple.
 Types of thermocouples
 Various types of thermocouples exist; they are usually classified
according to the data of Table
 The Seebeck coefficient shown in the table is specified at a given
temperature because the output voltage of a thermocouple, v, has
a nonlinear dependence on temperature.

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 2. Resistance temperature
detectors (RTDs)
 It is a variable-resistance device whose resistance is a function of
temperature.
 RTDs can be made with both positive and negative temperature
coefficients and offer greater accuracy and stability than
thermocouples.
 The RTD resistance has a fairly linear dependence on temperature.
 A common definition of the temperature coefficient of an RTD is
related to the change in resistance from 0◦ to 100◦C. Let R0 be the
resistance of the device at 0◦C and R100 the resistance at 100◦C.
Then the temperature coefficient, α, is defined to be

7  For a platinum RTD, the temperature coefficient α = 0.003911

 RTD circuit
 The change in resistance in an RTD is usually converted to a change
in voltage by forcing a current to flow through the device which
causes a self-heating error ( the i2R heating of the device).
 Because RTDs have fairly low resistance, they are sensitive to error
introduced by the added resistance of the lead wires connected to
them
 One possible solution takes
advantage of the properties of
the Wheatstone bridge to
cancel out the unwanted effect
of the lead wires while still
producing an output dependent
on the change in temperature.