A New Standard for Temperature Measurement in an Aviation Environment

Abstract

Accurate temperature measurement is an essential requirement in modern aircraft data acquisition systems. Both thermocouples and Platinum resistance temperature detectors (RTD) are used for this purpose with the latter being both more accurate and more repeatable. To ensure that only the sensor limits the accuracy of a temperature measurement, end-to-end system accuracy forward of the sensor, should be significantly greater than that of the sensor itself. This paper describes a new digital signal processing (DSP) based system for providing precision RTD based temperature measurements with laboratory accuracy in an aviation environment. Advantages of the new system include, true 3-wire RTD measurement, linear temperature output, on-board ultra-precision resistance standards and transparent dynamic calibration.