Thermocouple

Now that's what I call hot! But how hot is it, exactly? If you want to measure the temperature
of something as hot as a volcano, an ordinary thermometer isn't any use. Stick the bulb of a
mercury thermometer into volcanic lava (which can be well over 1000°C or 1800°F) and
you'll get a surprise: the mercury inside will instantly boil (it turns from liquid to gas at a
mere 356°C or 674°F) and the glass itself might even melt (if the lava is really hot)! Try
measuring something super-cold (like liquid nitrogen) with a mercury thermometer and you'll
have the opposite problem: at temperatures below −38°C/38°F, mercury is a solid lump of
metal! So how do you measure hot or cold things? With a cunning pair of electric cables
called a thermocouple. Let's take a closer look at how it works!

What's the connection between electricity and heat?

Have you noticed that when we talk about conduction in science, we can be referring to two
things? Sometimes we mean heat and sometimes we mean electricity. A metal
like iron or gold conducts both heat and electricity really well; a material like a plastic doesn't
conduct either of them very well at all. There is a connection between the way a metal
conducts heat and the way it conducts electricity. If you've read our main article
on electricity, you'll know electric current is carried through metals by tiny charged particles
inside atoms called electrons. When electrons "march" through a material, they haul
electricity with them a bit like ants carrying leaves. If electrons are free to carry electrical
energy through a metal, they're also free to carry heat energy—and that's why metals that
conduct electricity well are also good conductors of heat. (Things aren't quite so simple for
nonmetals, however, because heat travels through them in other, more complex ways. But for
the purposes of understanding thermocouples, metals are all we need to consider.)
 Thomas Seebeck and the thermoelectric effect
Suppose you stick an iron bar in a fire. You'll know you have let go of it quite quickly
because heat will be traveling up the metal from the fire to your fingers. But did you realize
that electricity is traveling up the bar as well? The first person to properly cotton on to this
idea was German physicist Thomas Seebeck (1770–1831), who found that if two ends of a
metal were at different temperatures, an electric current would flow through it. That's one
way of stating what's now known as the Seebeck effect or thermoelectric effect. Seebeck
found things got more interesting as he explored further. If he connected the two ends of the
metal together, no current flowed; similarly, no current flowed if the two ends of the metal
were at the same temperature.

Seebeck repeated the experiment with other metals and then tried using two different metals
together. Now if the way electricity or heat flows through a metal depends on the material's
inner structure, you can probably see that two different metals will produce different amounts
of electricity when they're heated to the same temperature. So what if you take an equal-
length strip of two different metals and join them together at their two ends to make a loop.
Next, dip one end (one of the two junctions) in something hot (like a beaker of boiling water)
and the other end (the other junction) in something cold. What you find then is that an electric
current flow through the loop (which is effectively an electric circuit) and the size of that
current is directly related to the difference in temperature between the two junctions. The key
thing to remember about the Seebeck effect is that the size of the voltage or current created
depends only on the type of metal (or metals) involved and the temperature difference. You
don't need a junction between different metals to produce a Seebeck effect: only a
temperature difference. In practice, however, thermocouples do use metal junctions.
Why does Seebeck effect happen?

As we've already seen, there's a close connection between how well electricity flows in a
material (electrical conductivity) and how well heat flows (thermal conductivity). We can
think of the electrons in a metal as being a bit like the molecules in a gas, which jiggle around
with kinetic energy. The hotter the gas, the more kinetic energy each molecule has, on
average, and the faster it jiggles. Just as gas molecules move faster when you heat them, so
electrons tend to "diffuse" more when a metal is hotter. If you heat one end of a metal
bar, electrons move quicker there and produce a net flow toward the colder end. This
makes the hotter end slightly positively charged and the colder end slightly negatively
charged, producing a voltage difference—the Seebeck effect.
Artwork: How the Seebeck effect works: if you heat one end of a metal (red arrow), electrons (white blobs) "diffuse" along it, making
the colder end slightly more negatively charged than the hotter end.

What about the Seebeck effect in a junction between two different metals? Electrons move
more freely in some materials than others. That's the basic difference between conductors and
insulators and between good conductors and bad ones. If you connect two different metals
together, free electrons tend to move from one material to the other through a kind of
diffusion. So, for example, if you connect a lump of copper to a lump of iron, electrons tend
to move from the iron to the copper, leaving the copper more negatively charged and the iron
more positively charged. If the iron and copper are joined in a loop with two junctions, one of
the junctions will gain a positive voltage and the other will gain an equal and opposite
negative voltage, making no voltage overall. But if one of the junctions is hotter than the
other, electrons will diffuse between the metals more readily there. That means the voltage at
the two junctions will be different by an amount that depends on their temperature difference.
That's the Seebeck effect—and it's the basis of how most thermocouples work.

Measuring temperatures with a thermocouple

See where we're going with this? If you measure a few known temperatures with this metal-
junction device, you can figure out the formula—the mathematical relationship—that links
the current and the temperature. That's called calibration: it's like marking the scale on a
thermometer. Once you've calibrated, you have an instrument you can use to measure the
temperature of anything you like. Simply place one of the metal junctions in a bath of ice (or
something else of a precisely known temperature). Place the other metal junction on the
object whose temperature you want to find out. Now measure the voltage change that occurs
and, using the formula you figured out before, you can precisely calculate the temperature of
your object. Brilliant! What we have here is a pair (couple) of metals that are joined together
(coupled) for measuring heat (which, in Greek, was called "thermos"). So that's why it's
called a thermocouple.

Artwork: The basic idea of a thermocouple: two dissimilar metals (gray curves) are joined
together at their two ends. If one end of the thermocouple is placed on something hot (the hot
junction) and the other end on something cold (the cold junction), a voltage (potential
difference) develops. You can measure it by placing a voltmeter (V) across the two junctions.
What are thermocouples used for?

Thermocouples are widely used in science and industry because they're generally very
accurate and can operate over a huge range of hot and cold temperatures. Since they generate
electric currents, they're also useful for making automated measurements: it's much easier to
get an electronic circuit or a computer to measure a thermocouple's temperature at regular
intervals than to do it yourself with a thermometer. Because there's not much to them apart
from a pair of metal strips, thermocouples are also relatively inexpensive and (provided the
metals involved have a high enough melting point) durable enough to survive in harsh
environments.

Photos: Left: A selection of thermocouples. Right: The kind of high-temperature laboratory test for which thermocouples are
invaluable. Both photos by courtesy of NASA Glenn Research Center (NASA-GRC).

A wide range of different thermocouples are available for different applications based on
metals with high conductivity, such as iron, nickel, copper, chromium, aluminum, platinum,
rhodium and their alloys. Sometimes a particular thermocouple is chosen purely because it
works accurately for a particular temperature range, but the conditions under which it
operates may also influence the choice (for example, the materials in the thermocouple might
need to be nonmagnetic, noncorrosive, or resistant to attack by particular chemicals).
 Thermocouple Cold (Reference) Junction Compensation
How does a thermocouple work?
Let’s look at how a thermocouple works. A thermocouple consists of two wires made of
different electrical conductors that are connected at one end (the “hot” end), that is the end
you want to use to measure the temperature with.

As discovered back in 1821 by Thomas Johann Seebeck, when the connection point of these
wires is taken into different temperatures, there will be a thermo-electric current generated,
causing a small voltage between the wires in the open end. The voltage depends on
temperature and on the materials of the conductive wires being used. This effect was named
as Seebeck effect.

Simplified principle picture of a thermocouple:

In the above picture: the “Thermocouple material 1 and 2” represent the two different
materials the thermocouple is made of. “T1” is the hot end of the thermocouple, i.e. the point
that is used to measure temperature. The two “Tcj” are the temperatures of the cold junctions.

The above explanation is somewhat simplified, as the thermovoltage is generated by the

temperature gradients in the thermocouple wire, all the way between the “hot” and “cold”
junctions. So, it is not the junction points that generate the voltage, but the temperature
gradient along the wire. It is easier to understand this by thinking that the thermovoltage is
generated in the junctions, hot and cold ones. Maybe more scientific thermocouple theory can
be provided in some other post later, but in this one, let’s stick with the practical
considerations.

Cold junction
Now, let’s start diving into the "cold junction"

Earlier, I showed the picture of the simplified thermocouple principle showing that the
thermovoltage is generated in the “hot” end connection, where the two different conductors
are connected together. The big question you should be asking here is: But what about the
other end of the wires?

What a good question! I’m glad you asked… ;-)

When you measure the voltage of the thermocouple, you could connect the thermocouple
wires into a multimeter, simple right? Not really! The multimeter connection material is
typically copper, or gold plated, so it is a different material than the thermocouple
material, meaning you create two new thermocouples in the multimeter connections!

Let’s illustrate that with a picture:

In the above picture, the material 1 and material 2 are the two thermocouple materials that
form the thermocouple. The “hot end” is the point where they are welded together and that is
the point that measures process temperature, this is where the voltage U1 is generated. This
U1 is what we want to measure. In the “cold junction” points, the thermocouple is connected
to the voltage meter that has connections made of different material, material 3. In these
connections, thermovoltage U2 and U3 are being generated. It is these U2 and U3 voltages
that we do not want to measure so we want to get rid of these or to compensate them.

As we can see in the above picture, you are actually measuring the voltage of three (3)
thermocouples connected in series. You would obviously like to measure only the voltage /
temperature of the “hot” junction only and not the other two junctions.

So, what can you do?

You need to somehow eliminate or compensate for the thermocouples created in the cold
junctions. There are different ways to do that. Let’s look at those next.

Cold junction options and compensation methods

1. Cold junction in ice-bath

By its nature, a thermocouple junction does not generate any thermovoltage when it is in 0°C
(32°F) temperature. So, you could make the cold junction at that temperature, for example in
an ice-bath or an accurate temperature block. You can connect the thermocouple wires into
copper wires in the ice-bath, and there is no thermovoltage generated in that connection. Then
you would not need to worry about the cold junction at all.

The connections need to be electrically isolated from the water in the ice-bath to avoid any
leak currents causing errors, or possible corrosion being generated.

This is a very accurate way and it’s something calibration laboratories typically do. It is
anyhow not very practical on a process plant floor, so it is not normally used in process
plants.

 
Example:

Type N thermocouple is connected as presented in the picture. Voltage meter shows 20808
µV. What is the measured temperature?

E = EN(tU1) – EN(tr)

Where:

E = measured voltage = 20808 µV

EN(tU1) = voltage generated in hot junction

EN(tr) = voltage generated in the cold (reference) junction = 0 µV (IEC 60584 type N, 0 °C)

EN(tU1) = E + EN(tr) = 20808 µV + 0 µV = 20808 µV = 605 °C (IEC 60584 type N, 20808 µV)

So, the temperature is 605 °C.

2. Cold junction in a known, fixed temperature

Since the ice-bath was found to be impractical, you can also do the cold junction connection
in some other known, fixed temperature. You can have a small connection box that has a
temperature control keeping the box always at a certain temperature. Typically, the
temperature is higher than environment temperature, so the box needs only heating, not
cooling.

When you know the temperature that your cold junction is in, and you also know the type of
your thermocouple, you can calculate and compensate the cold junction thermovoltage.
Many measurement devices or temperature calibrators have a functionality where you can
enter the temperature of the cold junction and the device will do all the calculations for you
and make the compensation.

Example:

Type N thermocouple is connected as presented in the picture. Voltage meter shows 19880
µV. The temperature of the cold (reference) junction is 35 °C. What is the measured
temperature?

E = EN(tU1) – EN(tr)

Where:

E = measured voltage = 19880 µV

EN(tU1) = voltage generated by the hot end

EN(tr) = voltage generated in reference (or cold) junction = 928 µV (IEC 60584 type N, 35 °C)

EN(tU1) = E + EN(tr) = 19880 µV + 928 µV = 20808 µV = 605 °C (IEC 60584 type N, 20808
µV)

So, the measured temperature is 605 °C.

Please note that thermocouple calculations must always be made in voltage. A common error
is to look for the table value for the measured voltage and add the cold junction temperature.
In this case, the corresponding temperature for the measured 19880 µV according to IEC
60584 standard is 581.2 °C. Calculation using temperature values would give 581.2 °C + 35
°C = 616.2 °C. The error is + 11.2 °C.

 
 3. Measure the temperature of the cold junction
If you don’t adjust the cold junction temperature like in the previous example, you can
anyhow measure the temperature of the cold junction with a temperature probe. You can then
compensate the cold junction effect, but the compensation is a little bit more difficult as you
need to measure the cold junction temperature all the time, and knowing your thermocouple
type, make calculations to know the effect of the cold junction.

Luckily, many temperature calibrators provide a functionality to use a temperature probe to

measure the cold junction temperature and the device makes all the compensations and
calculations automatically.

4. Automatic on-line compensation in the measuring device

I mentioned that the previous example was difficult as you always need to calculate the
compensation, but you could leave that to the measuring device to do it automatically. The
measuring device (being a transmitter, DCS input card or temperature calibrator) can be
measuring the temperature of the cold junction all the time and automatically perform an on-
line compensation of the cold junction error. Since the measuring device also knows the
thermocouple type (you select that in the menu), it can make the compensation automatically
and continuously. This is naturally the easiest and most practical way to compensate the cold
junction in normal measurements and calibrations, as you don’t need to worry about the cold
junction and leave for the equipment to take care of. You just plug in the thermocouple wire
into the device.
The Beamex temperature calibrators are also supporting this kind of automatic compensation.