Autorange Thermal Sigma–Delta Converter for Incident Radiation Measurement

Thermal sigma-delta modulator is a closed-loop measurement approach, where the sensing element performs part of the Σ Δ modulation in the thermal domain. A new architecture is proposed in this paper for measuring the thermal incident radiation using thermoresistive sensors, where the modulator input range is automatically adjusted to fit the complete thermal radiation. The proposed architecture is compared with a similar one, which uses the same transducer interface circuit but without range adjustment, and is validated experimentally with a reference pyranometer. The proposed architecture has the main advantage of presenting a signal-to-noise ratio and sensitivity that is independent of the ambient temperature range definition. Experimental results for an ambient temperature range of 45 °C show a gain of 13 dB over the similar one.