Two-stage segment linearization as part of the thermocouple measurement chain

An implementation of a two-stage piece-wise linearization method for reduction of the thermocouple approximation error is presented in the paper. First, the whole thermocouple measurement chain of a transducer is described, and possible error is analysed to define the required level of accuracy for linearization of the transfer characteristics. Evaluation of linearization functions and analysis of approximation errors are performed by the virtual instrumentation software package LabVIEW. The method is appropriate for thermocouples and other sensors where nonlinearity varies a lot over the range of input values. The basic principle of this method is to first transform the abscissa of the transfer function by a linear segment look-up table in such a way that significantly nonlinear parts of the input range are expanded before a standard piece-wise linearization. In this way, applying equal-segment linearization two times has a similar effect to non-equal-segment linearization. For a given examples of the thermocouple transfer functions, the suggested method provides significantly better reduction of the approximation error, than the standard segment linearization, with equal memory consumption for look-up tables. The simple software implementation of this two-stage linearization method allows it to be applied in low calculation power microcontroller measurement transducers, as a replacement of the standard piece-wise linear approximation method.

Prediction of Dilution and Its Impact on the Metallurgical and Mechanical Behavior of a Multipass Steel Weldment

A three-pass groove weld made by gas-tungsten arc welding in a 20-mm thick SA508 steel plate is modeled to predict the thermal, metallurgical, and mechanical behavior. The dilution for each pass is estimated as the proportion of base material in the weld metal, based on the predicted cross-sectional areas for the fusion zone (FZ) associated with each individual pass. The temperature predictions are consistent with the thermocouple measurement data and cross-weld macrographs. The predicted microstructures are qualitatively compared with the observed microstructures in cross-weld optical micrographs. The measured hardness is then used to quantitatively validate the predictions for postweld microconstituents (e.g., the ferrite, bainite, and martensite fractions), based on a hardness-microstructure correlation. The predicted residual stresses are compared with those measured by neutron diffraction. The results show that the dilution significantly affects the metallurgical and mechanical properties of weld metal (either as-deposited or reheated), and its consideration notably improves the predictions for microstructure and residual stress in the multipass steel weldment. Furthermore, the increase in dilution promotes the formation of martensite, which enhances the hardness, and leads to lower tensile stresses (or higher compressive stresses) in the weld metal. Such behavior arises due to the higher hardenability of the base material employed in this study, coupled with delayed austenite decomposition on cooling.

Research of Low Noise Analog Measurement on High Temperature Thermocouple Based on dsPIC33

Since thermocouple has an intrinsic disadvantage that its signal is very weak, many problems usually appear such as large noise and low temperature resolution when thermocouples are being used. Aiming this defect on thermocouple measurement, this paper proposes a solution of analog circuit design that provides the character of low noise and high SNR. This paper discusses the analog circuit design and calculation based on the S-type thermocouple which is often used for a very wide temperature range. This designed module can be applied to measurement instruments.