Featured New Items

Pond Engineering Laboratories' (Colorado-USA)
Defining Standard Cells for ITS-90 and Accessories

With an emphasis on primary temperature standards and associated equipment to calibrate thermometers on the International Temperature Scale of 1990 (ITS-90), Pond have developed a line of standard products which cover the range of temperature from the Triple Point of Argon (-189.3442 C) to the Freezing Point of Silver (961.78 C).

The easiest to use and most cost- effective of all the defining fixed points, the Triple Point of Water (TPW) (above in three views-from the left, 1. crossection sketch of thetwo versions available, 2 photos of the same, and 3. a closeup sketch showing the white frost mantle around the inner tube) provides the ultimate in accuracy for calibration of precision thermometers of many types. Uncertainty, reproducibility and stability of the temperature realized in a TPW Cell is nothing short of phenomenal. Pond Engineering TPW Cells are guaranteed to realize a temperature within +0.000 0, -0.000 2 K of the theoretical ideal TPW. Furthermore, this high standard of accuracy is guaranteed for five full years.

The complete Pond Engineering product line includes:
K18C Mercury Triple Point Cell
K23 Indium Freeze, K23 Tin Freeze, K23 Zinc Freeze, K23 Aluminum Freeze, K23 Silver
K28C Gallium Melting Point Cell
K29A, B Water Triple Point Cell
K38 Argon Triple Point Cell

Also, Pond provides associated maintenace equipment for maitaining a plateau and furnaces and extrapolating RTD instruments for traversing the temperatures between reference primary and secondary points. With these equipment and properly trained staff and good practices, a calibration lab can realize the ITS-90, over a large portion of its range, in house, thus saving on external certification costs and assuring control of delivery of time-sensitive, traceably-certified products.

To complement these products there is are special, high quality digital RTD and thermocouple indicators such as:

K45 Precision Platinum Resistance Thermometer Digital Readout
Covering:
Temperature Display Range: -200°C to 662°C
Uncertainty -200 to 232 °C: +/- 0.003°C
Uncertainty 232 to 662 °C: +/- 0.007°C

And

K46 Precision Pure Element Thermocouple Thermometer
Covering:
Gold vs. Platinum or Platinum vs. Palladium Probes
Precision Internal Cold Junction Compensation
Temperature Display Range: 0°C up to 1500°C

NEW Links of Interest - October 2002

Calibration Page

Pond Engineering Laboratories (USA)
Triple point of water and other fixed points and related equipment and training for realizing the International Temperature Scale of 1990 to very high precision.

Insco Metrology (USA)
Temperature calibration services for TCs, RTDs, LiGs traceable to NIST to 1100 °C and with their custom-made fixed point cells ( FPs Hg,Ga, In, Sn, Zn, Al, Ag).

Links Page

Vantage Pro Wireless Weather Station (USA)
Measures wind speed, direction, humidity, indoor and outdoor temperature and then predicts weather, wind chill and heat index values. A remote sensor array collects data and transmits wirelessly to a well-designed display unit that can be up to 400 feet away. The update time is 2.5 seconds. Solar-powered repeater units are available to extend seperation between sensors and display up to 1/2 mile.

Fascinating Electronics, Inc.(USA)
Specializes in electronic kits that link computers to the physical world-includes kits for adding temperature sensors and entire weather stations to your PC.

NEW Vendor Links

Bimetallic Thermometer Vendors Page

Jumo Process Control
Bimet thermometers, thermostats, control and much more

Precision Instrument Company USA
Top quality bimetallic gauges for installations ,3" & 5" dials, and pocket test gauges in both digital and bimet types. Also a wide line of economy style, hot water, magnetic type and dual pressure/temperature "Tridicators"

Versa Gauge USA
Industrial round gauges (2" to 5") in ANSI 304 SS (316 option)for all types of environments including high vibration ones. Stem lengths from 2" to 72" available.

DAS/DAQ Page

Status Instruments, Inc.(USA)
Temperature and Humidity electronic transmitters, field loop-powered transmitters, low cost, smart digital displays forn RTDs, TCs and more.

Accutech (USA)
Current transmitters for TCs, RTDs (Pt, Ni & Cu) plus millivolt and resistance-Units reknown for stability (automatic ambient temperature & cold junction compensation), rapid response, RFI rejection, self-calibration, NIST traceability in absolute accuracy, versitile designs, HART communications.

Thermocouple Vendors Page

Jumo Process Control
Food thermometers, thermocouples, control and much more

SensorTec Inc., USA
A thermocouple supplier that specializes in high quality and innovative sensor solutions with expertise in food & sanitary temperature measurements

Versa Gauge USA
Unique dual tc/Bimet or RTD/Bimet with industrial round gauges (3"& 5") in ANSI 304 SS-to provide both local and remote temperature values.

Infrared Radiation Thermometer Vendors Page

Chino Works America Inc. USA & Japan
A global instrument company with a significant line of industrial & research infrared radiation thermometers.

Engelhard Corporation USA
Makers of the "Exactus" brand of high performance optical pyrometers designed primarily for OEM wafer-temperature measurement applications in both 0.9 and 1.6 micron wavelength passband models. Utilize both lightpipe (Quartz, Sapphire & proprietary materials) and lens models.

Eurotron Instruments S.p.a. (Italy)
Manufacturers of the IRTec line ofindustrial online & portable infrared thermometers that include 8 single waveband devices covering the -30 °C to 1600 °C range and ratio infrared (Two Colour) thermometers for the 600 °C to 2000 °C region, including Fahrenheit models. Looks like a new player on the European scene with attractive designs and crisp literature.

Heitronics GmbH (Germany)
Non-Contact Temperature Measurements from -50°C to 3000°C; non-contact temperature measurements with more than 40 years of experience and an installed base of infrared thermometers and systems with thousands of customers worldwide.

The new new look, feel and morecommunity-oriented web site for About Temperature Sensors is not quite ready for prime time, but we are going ahead with it anyhow. The web address (URL) is temporarily at www.tempsensor.net. We shall continue the existing format in parallel while we continue to transfer the content to the new site and figure out how people can keep their bookmarks intact. It may be useful for those who bookmark special pages to look over the new site and capture the equivalent page there, too.

COMMENTS and MORE SITE RANKINGS

Notice to PR and Ad staffs in equipment and service companies:

Send us your new product, new staff, and related news releases, please and we'll get them into our queue for release on the site and/or this newsletter.

Listed below are the Alexa Web site rankings at the end of October and the preceeding two months. The rose color indicates that a site became less popular during the month, the green or aqua indicates more popular. The numbers provide a quantitative measure of the site popularity according to the Alexa ranking system.

It is interesting to note that the dominant color this past month is now rose! That's not good news. Most of the societies that we list show reduced popularity with the notable exceptions of the IEEE ( reversing a three month decline). Note ISA now with a three month decline and ASNT recovering very nicely. Again, some of the vendor ratings had significant changes in the last month. Land Instruments contimues taking giant steps upwards for the third month in a row and Raytek continues to slide backwards for the third month. Hart Scientific continues to grow in populariy while JMS-SouthEast made another large increase again, jumping ahead of both Raytek & Ircon. That seems quite remarkable since JMS-SE is not a nation-wide company manufacturing many products but primarily a distributor. Note that the three major thermal imager makers have lost popularity this month, with Flir continuing a loss for each of the past three months. Remember, there are rankings for sites out to more than the 23 million we mentioned last month. Latest estimates put the number of web sites at about 35 million!

So, in context of a popularity rating, a position of 1 or 2 million doesn't seem so bad. However the rankings of sites of similar organizations competing for web hits and exposure does seem to indicate at least relative success or lack thereof in attracting visitors. And we all know, or should know, the first rule of selling: Inform-tell them who you are and what you do. The web is the lowest cost ever "informer" per prospect.

We believe companies can improve their visitor rate, sales and marketing operations, sales communications and generate more orders through proper focus on their Web resources. The Internet, especially the Web, is a revolutionary new marketing and business tool. We are redesigning our site to demonstrate just what is possible on the Web even for a small company.

Note from the above Alexa ratings that our web site consistently acheives a lower ranking (meaning it is more popular) than nearly all the vendors of temperature sensors, with the major exceptions of GlobalSpec, Omega Engineering and Flir. But we are beginning to gain slowly and steadily.

Thanks for visiting.