A Low-Noise High-Resolution Temperature Measurement Technique Based on Inductive Voltage Divider and...

In the field of space gravitational wave detection, high-precision temperature measurement with a resolution at the micro-Kelvin level in the milli-Hertz frequency range is required to mitigate the interference caused by temperature fluctuations around the core components. This is a very challenging task due to resistance thermal noise and the inherent 1/f noise of electronic components. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a low-noise, high-resolution temperature measurement method based on an inductive voltage divider and an alternating-current (AC) bridge. The proposed method has the following three characteristics: (1) it employs an AC excitation signal to drive the temperature measuring bridge to overcome the influence of 1/f noise in electronic components; (2) it uses as few resistance components as possible in the AC bridge and signal detection circuit to reduce the impact of resistance thermal noise on the measurement results; (3) it adopts a frequency-domain data processing algorithm based on discrete Fourier transform to improve the accuracy of the temperature measuring result. Using this method, a circuit board is designed and tested. The results show that the noise floor level of the designed temperature measurement circuit is below 7×10-6 K/Hz in a frequency range of 0.005~1 Hz. This demonstrates that our proposed method is able to detect extremely weak temperature change signals and meets the temperature measurement requirements of space gravitational wave detection.