Development of High Frequency Virtual Thermocouples

This paper presents a numerical procedure to enhance the frequency response of temperature probes equipped with two thermocouple junctions of different diameter. The output of the two thermocouples exposed to the same flow transient can be used to predict the output of a virtual smaller thermocouple, which cannot be physically realized. The approach is demonstrated numerically, with the aid of conjugate heat transfer simulations performed with 3D Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes. The dual junction thermocouple with wire diameters of 50 μm, 25 μm were exposed to several inlet temperatures and pressures to analyze the overall recovery factor. Then multiple unsteady tests were performed. The analysis of those transient tests was used to determine the transfer function in the time domain between the two wires and to perform a digital compensation to predict the performance of a much thinner wire thermocouple. This method was assessed by recovering the theoretical response of the 12.5 μm thermocouple with our dual-junction thermocouple probe for several pressures and wall temperatures. Finally, the procedure was applied to a virtual fine wire thermocouple of 6 μm and a frequency response around 700 Hz.