A Novel Technique for the Temperature Dependent Studies of Materials Using a Microwave Resonant Cavity

-This study presents a linearization technique for transducers by using software solutions programmed into a microcontroller. Existing data acquisition systems linearize nonlinear transducer characteristics in real time using analog linearizing circuitry, which are susceptible to errors due fluctuations in power supply voltage, temperature, and interference from correlated and uncorrelated noise sources in the system. The goal of this work is to replace analog hardware techniques for linearization using software solutions provided by microcontrollers, which also has inherent capabilities for performing signal conditioning and data acquisition among others. The methodology for linearization is the piecewiselinear software approximation technique using the one-sixth and five-sixth operating points on each segment, and results show an improvement over the end point approximations. This technique is successfully used in an existing microcontroller to monitor the temperature of a microwave resonant cavity. The resonant cavity is used to study the microwave dielectric response of different materials as a function of temperature and frequency.