[time-nuts] quartz thermometers

Larry McDavid lmcdavid at lmceng.com
Sat Mar 12 11:49:42 EST 2016


In case you missed the significance of Tom's clarification below, note 
that the thermal conductivity of helium is 6 times that of air and the 
heat capacity of helium is 5 times that of air. These are big differences!

We once built a GCMS for NASA; two were landed on Mars. Modules of the 
GCMS were heated to 225° C in operation by various foil and wire wound 
heaters. Tested in one atmosphere of air or in 25 millibar CO2 (Mars 
atmosphere), these heaters worked well. At one point during organic 
cleaning, I happened to run the heaters in helium at slightly lower than 
atmospheric pressure; the heaters could not be heated to 225° C because 
of the characteristics of helium.

Helium has unusual properties!

Larry


On 3/12/2016 3:03 AM, Tom Van Baak wrote:
> Neville,
>
> Apparently it's not vacuum mounted, but helium filled. Lots of good info here:
>
> http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1965-03.pdf
>
> /tvb
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Neville Michie" <namichie at gmail.com>
> To: "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement" <time-nuts at febo.com>
> Sent: Saturday, March 12, 2016 2:19 AM
> Subject: Re: [time-nuts] quartz thermometers
>
>
>> It always puzzled me that quartz crystals would be considered prime temperature sensors.
>> I can see that an instrument could be built that reliably showed many decimal places of reading,
>> but I could never accept that a vacuum mounted quartz crystal would be closely enough
>> thermally coupled to whatever was having its temperature measured.
...

-- 
Best wishes,

Larry McDavid W6FUB
Anaheim, California  (SE of Los Angeles, near Disneyland)


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