Design And Testing Of Radiosonde Temperature Sensor

To accurately detect the temperature of the upper atmosphere, radiosondes are often applied. Radiosondes play an important role in meteorology observations. It provides a way to measure the temperature of the atmosphere directly. With the development of microelectronics and micro-machining technology, resistive temperature micro-sensors were developed. As platinum resistive sensors show better performances than conventional temperature sensors, they are always used to detect the temperature of the atmosphere. The object of this paper is to reduce the errors of a temperature sensor applied in a high-altitude environment.The paper presents a method for packaging of radiosonde temperature sensors. The packaged sensor has advantages of small sizes, fast response properties and simple fabricated processes. The sizes of a packaged sensor are approximately 1.5mm ×1 mm. As the packaged radiosonde temperature sensor developed in this paper is small, thermal hysteresis can be ignored. Solar radiation is the main factor causing measurement errors in high-altitude measurements. The effect of solar radiation on the temperature sensors can be reduced by an anti-radiation coating. Anti-radiation coating processes are developed on the surface of temperature sensor in this paper. Radiation experiment is conducted to evaluate the effect of the anti-radiation coating under different solar radiation intensity.A testing system is designed to evaluate the packaged temperature sensor. Test results show that the measurement error is within±0.2? in a temperature range of-90??+40?. The sensitivity of the sensor is about 3.54?/?. The sensor has a short response time and a good long-term stability. The response time is about 1.75s under normal atmospheric pressure. Besides, the results of radiation experiment show that the anti-radiation coating can effectively reduce the measurement errors caused by solar radiation.