APPM 3050 Project 1

Daniel Lopez Hayley Schneider Emily Howard

Spring 2011
 Introduction This project focuses on the designing of a circuit which uses a ther-
mistor to regulate an output voltage based on the temperature of the surrounding
environment. The relationship between the output voltage versus temperature should
be an approximately linear function, represented by

Vout = TF /10 (1)

between 60o F and 100o F.

0.1 Circuit Description

This circuit utilizes a B57891M103J thermistor, a potentiometer, an inverting opera-

tional amplifier, two voltage sources (5 V and 12.522 V), and one resistor (5 kΩ). The
potentiometer uses the 5 V voltage source, feeding into the inverting amplifier with the
thermistor in the feedback loop. The additional voltage source is added to the output
of the amplifier, yielding Vout .

0.1.1 Block Diagram

Figure 1: Block diagram

0.2 Nom. Resistance, Thermistor vs. Temperature

The following figure shows the corresponding data between the thermistor resistance
and temperature, between 30o F and 120o F:

1
 Figure 2: Data

Figure 3: Graph

0.3 Full Circuit Schematic

The final circuit diagram, with the necessary values included:

Figure 4: Full circuit daigram

0.4 Calculations

The potentiometer is used to set the initial voltage, Vx (found to be −2.1363 V). This
voltage is the input to the inverting amplifier, which is governed by the equation

RT herm
Vout,1 = −Vx (2)
R2

where R2 was chosen to be 5 kΩ, to be of similar magnitude to the other resistances. A

constant amount of voltage was then added to the output of the inverting amplifier to
help create the desired voltage. This added value, A, was found to be 12.52 V. In order
to add this a summing amplifier was included with all three resistors of the same value
2
(chosen to be the same value as R2 for ease of calculation). This yields the following
equation
Vout,2 = −(Vout,1 + 12.52) (3)

Another inverting amplifier was used to flip the sign back to positive, with both resistors
equal to the same value (again chosen to be the same as R2 ). Combining these equations
yields the governing equation for the circuit which can be seen in the equation below

Vx RT herm −2.1363RT herm

Vout,f = −Vout,2 = +A= + 12.52 (4)
R2 5000

where RT herm is a function of temperature. Corresponding values were available on the

given product chart for the thermistor.

RT herm (60o F ) = 15265Ω (5)

RT herm (100o F ) = 5903.5Ω (6)

Plugging these resistance values in yields the following values for Vout :

Vout (60o F ) = 5.998V ≈ 6V (7)

Vout (100o F ) = 9.998V ≈ 10V (8)

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0.4.1 Voltage Output vs. Temperature

The following figure shows the corresponding data between the voltage output and
temperature, between 30o F and 120o F:

Figure 5: Data

Figure 6: Graph