The measurement system for the automatic determination of characteristic points of solid materials

New method for the automatic determination of characteristic points of phase transitions of solid materials like sintering, softening, melting and flow points is presented. This method is based on the examination of the emissivity variation of the sample surface. The special system for the continuous observation and analysis of these variation was built. This system is equipped with the vertical tube furnace, radiation pyrometer, two thermocouples, computer PC with A/D converter and control and analysis software working in Windows 95. Important part of this work is connected with the data measurement correction. A special digital filtering algorithm based upon piece-wise second order polynomial approximation is applied.