The stability of the thermocouple after the second heating period was of the same order as the standard deviation of the third set of measurements, namely ±0.15 and ±0.67 lV at the Al and Ag points, respectively.
The results also show that there is an increase in EMF at the freezing points of Al and Ag as a result of the 50 h anneal at about 960 C.
This has been also found by Burns et al. [1]. They mentioned that the source of drift in Pt/Pd thermocouple is intrinsic to the Pd wire.
The results of the stability test for the thermocouple are illustrated in Fig. 1, in which the deviations with respect to the initial EMF values at the freezing points of Al and Ag are plotted as a function of annealing time in hour, this test has been carried out at an interval of time of about one year.
Fig. 2 shows the effect of heat treatment on the repeatability of the thermocouple expressed as standard deviation in microvolt of each set of freezing experiments against time of annealing.
At Al freezing point the repeatability has been improved from 43 mK (0.6 lV) to 11 mK (0.15 lV) and at the Ag freezing point the repeatability has been improved from 100 mK (1.92 lV) to 35 mK (0.67 lV) after 50 h of annealing at 960 C.
For calibration and interpolation between measured data we have used the standard reference function suggested by Burns et al. [1].
This function covers the range from 0 to 1500 C.
Two different spline polynomials of eighth and sixth order were suggested in the range 0–660.32 and 660.32–1500 C, respectively.
The reference function suggested by Burns et al.is The EMF deviations resulting from subtracting the reference function EMFs from the measured EMFs were fitted with quadratic polynomial.
The coefficients of the deviation function are added to those of the reference function to give the coefficients of the calibration function for the thermocouple used in this work.
For the derivation of the coefficients of the deviation function in the range from 660 to 1064 C we have used the EMFs of the Pt/Pd thermocouples at the freezing point of Al and Ag after 50 h of annealing given in Table 1 and the emf at the melting point of Au by the wire method which is 12,850.7 lV.
Calibrations were also performed from 600 to 950 C by comparison with a HTSPRT using variable temperature heat pipe furnace.
The data are given in Table 2.