Thermocouples are one of the most widely used temperature
measurement devices due to their low cost, ease of manufacture and robustness.
However, their robustness is obtained at the expense of limited sensor
bandwidth. Consequently, in many applications signal compensation techniques
are needed to recover the true temperature from the attenuated measurements.
This, is turn, necessitates in situ thermocouple characterisation. Recently the
authors proposed a novel characterisation technique based on the cross-relation
method of blind deconvolution applied to the output of two thermocouples
simultaneously measuring the same temperature. This offers a number of
advantages over competing methods including low estimation variance and no
need for a priori knowledge of the time constant ratio. A weakness of the
proposed method is that it yields biased estimates in the presence of
measurement noise. In this paper we propose the inclusion of a signal
conditioning step in the characterisation algorithm to improve the robustness to
noise. The enhanced performance of the resulting algorithm is demonstrated
using both simulated and experimental data
