Infrared thermometers for small wires drawing

This work describes the design of two contactless thermometers based respectively on a total radiance and two-color pyrometry scheme, developed to measure the temperature of a small brass coated steel wire during wire drawing. In this critical condition, wire oscillation and relevant insertion errors do not allow using commercial contact or contactless sensors. Thus, ad hoc pyrometers optical layouts have been designed in order to minimize sensitivity to the wire oscillations and emissivity changes. Moreover, performances associated to different infrared detectors have been compared using as figure of merit the achieved measurement uncertainty simulating typical disturbances, i.e. the background temperature variation, the slope of the wire’s emissivity and the effect of the atmosphere transmittance. Finally, the uncertainty budgets were drawn, evidencing the limitations of the proposed methods and identifying the best configuration for both developed instruments.