Research on calibration method of relative infrared radiometer

The Relative Infrared Radiometer (RIR) is commonly used to measure the irradiance of the Infrared Target Simulator (ITS), and the calibration of the RIR is central for the measurement accuracy. RIR calibration is conventionally performed using the Radiance Based (RB) calibration method or Irradiance Based (IB) calibration method, and the relationship between the radiation of standard source and the response of RIR is determined by curve fitting. One limitation existing in the calibration of RIR is the undesirable calibration voltage fluctuation in single measurement or in the reproducibility measurement, which reduces the calibration reproducibility and irradiance measurement accuracy. To address this limitation, the Equivalent Blackbody Temperature Based (EBTB) calibration method is proposed for the calibration of RIR. The purpose of this study is to compare the proposed EBTB calibration method with conventional RB and IB calibration methods. The comparison and experiment results have shown that the EBTB calibration method is not only able to provide comparable correlation between radiation and response to other calibration methods (IB and RB) in the irradiance measurement but also reduces the influence of calibration voltage fluctuation on the irradiance measurement result, which improves the calibration reproducibility and irradiance measurement accuracy.