A simple temperature compensation method for turbidity sensor

Abstract

Turbidity sensor for water treatment applications are based on scattered light measurement. The electrooptical characteristic of light emitter and detector has a close relationship with the environmental temperature. Fluctuations in water temperature can potentially affect electronic components and cause output signal errors in turbidity sensor. Decrease or eliminate temperature error is necessary. With this background we have taken the temperature experiment of turbidity sensor developed by us. 11 different concentrations were measured, ranging from 0 to 100NTU. Each solution was cooled to 1°C, and then gradually heated to 40°C. The output signal of sensor increased according to the rise of temperature found from the experiment. In order to compensate the temperature errors, we developed a novel method to take temperature compensation by using software. The method carried by MCU which is used to compensate the measurement errors by soft programming is simple and effective; it can improve the error compensation precision on sensors greatly. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.