Compensation of temperature-drift errors with no additional hardware

Conventional and new approaches for temperature-drift compensation have been reviewed. It has been shown that the main advantage of the new approach is that it does not require additional hardware. This approach can be applied to measurement systems in which the input transducer has either more than one temperature-dependent transfer characteristic, or additional transfer characteristics can be obtained through the modification of the input transducer operation. Having two independent transfer characteristics, one can exclude temperature and obtain a temperature-independent measurand model. The efficiency of the new approach depends on the repeatability of the input transducer transfer characteristics. A simple polynomial approximation of the measurand model was used in the application example. To bring the temperature-compensation efficiency to the level limited by the repeatability of the transfer characteristics of the input transducer, advanced fitting methods [10] can be used. For the sake of generality, we considered in this paper acbias sensors. In dc case, the synchronous detector showed in Figures 1, 2, and 3(b) can be simply disregarded. Some parts of this paper were presented at IMTC 2006 (