Hysteresis Effects and Strain-Induced Homogeneity Effects in Base Metal Thermocouples

Abstract

Thermocouples are used in a wide variety of industrial applications in which they play an important role for temperature control and monitoring. Wire inhomogeneity and hysteresis effects are major sources of uncertainty in thermocouple measurements. To efficiently mitigate these effects, it is first necessary to explore the impact of strain-induced inhomogeneities and hysteresis, and their contribution to the uncertainty. This article investigates homogeneity and hysteresis effects in Types N and K mineral-insulated metal-sheathed (MIMS) thermocouples. Homogeneity of thermocouple wires is known to change when mechanical strain is experienced by the thermoelements. To test this influence, bends of increasingly small radii, typical in industrial applications, were made to a number of thermocouples with different sheath diameters. The change in homogeneity was determined through controlled immersion of the thermocouple into an isothermal liquid oil bath at \(150\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}\) and was found to be very small at \(0.09\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}\) for Type K thermocouples, with no measureable change in Type N thermocouples found. An experiment to determine the hysteresis effect in thermocouples was performed on swaged, MIMS Type N and Type K thermocouples, in the temperature range from \(200\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}\) to \(1000\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}\). The hysteresis measurements presented simulate the conditions that thermocouples may be exposed to in industrial applications through continuous cycling over 136 h. During this exposure, a characteristic drift from the reference function has been observed but no considerable difference between the heating and cooling measurements was measureable. The measured differences were within the measurement uncertainties; therefore, no hysteresis was observed.