Abstract
Thermocouple and R TD simulators are instruments that fall into the 'intelligent instrument' category and are increasingly being used for calibration and fault diagnosis purposes in applications where thermocouple and resistance-temperature detectors (RTDs) are used for the sensing of temperature, These instruments depend on storing and retrieval of the transducer characteristics so that, in operation, the instrument will meet and exceed the British Standards for thermocouples and RTDs.
This paper contains a detailed study of the problem of storage and generation of the transducer characteristics, concluding that linear curve fitting combined with the exchange algorithm offers the best solution for instruments based on cheap, low-powered microprocessors with limited instruction sets.