Heating up the standards
Development of new high temperature standards can lead to greater energy efficiency for industrial processes and give a better understanding of climate change.
The Challenge
High-temperature industrial processing in the UK uses the energy equivalent of 120 million barrels of oil per annum. At temperatures below 1350 K reference standards are available to provide known points against which instruments can be checked to improve efficiency and save energy. However there are no internationally agreed high temperature references that are sufficiently well understood to be of use. Such standards are required in order to aid efficient operation and improve product yield of industrial processes at higher temperatures.
The Solution
In the last few years standards (fixed-points) based on the melting temperature of particular alloys of metals and carbon have made improvements at temperatures above 1350 K a real possibility. An additional goal is to develop higher temperature standards (over 2800 K) to be used as standards for radiometry. This would improve measurements of the sun and its interaction with the atmosphere and enable us to gain a better understanding of climate change.
NPL is leading Europe in the development of these high temperature fixed-points, but demonstrating equivalence at such high temperatures has been difficult. Significant progress has been made through an international secondment.
Dr Tiejun Wang of the National Metrology Institute in China (NIM) has gained valuable experience in high-temperature fixed-points at the Japanese national metrology institute, NMIJ, who are regarded as the world leaders in this area. During his six month secondment to NPL Dr Wang constructed a fixed-point and carried out a comparison with a NIM standard using an NPL furnace and radiation thermometer in order to validate the results. The agreement was within 40 mK at 2011 K, or less than 2 parts in 100,000. This is extremely good and shows that high temperature references will soon be a reality.
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