Noncontact temperature sensors include many different types, but all share one set of unique features: they are often involved with an optical property of materials called spectral emissivity or spectral emittance.

Just to be sure we are addressing the subject you are seeking, be aware that these devices are called by a bewildering variety of names.

They all work, or are based on, the same law of physics, Planck’s Law of the thermal emission of radiation.

Here’s just a few of the names used in current technical and popular literature – see our E-missivity Trail section for a partial understanding of this latter phenomenon

ir thermometer, radiation thermometer, ir pyrometer, infrared thermometer, spot thermometer, spot radiometer (our favorite technical misnomer), line scanner, radiation pyrometer, single waveband pyrometer, dual waveband pyrometer, ratio pyrometer, 2 color thermometer, 2 colour thermometer, two color thermometer, two colour pyrometer, radiometer, spectral radiometer, IR thermocouple, total radiation pyrometer, fiber optic pyrometer, disappearing filament pyrometer, quantitative thermal imager, dfp, optical pyro, multiwavelength pyrometer, and on and on.

Types of Noncontact Sensors

• Radiation Thermometers

  Includes Pyrometers, line-measuring thermometers (most of the time they’re called line scanners-but all don’t scan) and infrared (IR) radiation thermometers, or, perhaps the most-misused term, spot radiometers.

• Thermal Imagers

  Quantitative thermal imagers are a special sub-class of these thermal imaging devices, they measure radiation temperature distributions as well as showing a false color thermal image.

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