A Study on Miniaturized In-Situ Self-Calibrated Thermometers Based on Ga and Ga-Zn Fixed Points

Abstract

In order to ensure the reliability and accuracy of long-term temperature measurement where the thermometers are discommodious or even impossible to access for conventional periodical calibration, a study on miniaturized in-situ self-calibrated (MISSC) thermometers based on Ga and Ga-Zn fixed points was conducted using temperature scale transfer technology. One MISSC thermometer consists of three parts: the first is the fixed-points hardware, including a container with two cells separately filled with Ga and Ga-Zn; the second is the temperature sensing hardware, made of a Type T thermocouple; the third is the mini-power heating hardware, made of a film resistance. The measurement and calibration (M&C) system comprises a temperature measurement and data processing subsystem and a mini-power heating control subsystem. Then, an in-situ self-calibration can be carried out by mini-power heating from a room temperature of about 20 °C, and then by comparison between the measured phase transition plateau results and the standard fixed-points, i.e., Ga fixed point (about 29.76 °C) and Ga-Zn fixed point (about 25.20 °C). A series of experiments were performed, and the results show that: (1) both the proposed hardware design and the self-calibration method are feasible, and (2) the Φ16 mm × 25 mm MISSC thermometer is found to be the most miniaturized one that can realize reliable self-calibration in this study.