Measurement 43 (2010) 735738

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Measurement
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/measurement

A new and low cost lead resistance compensation technique

for resistive sensors
Tapan Kr. Maiti a,*, Asim Kar b
a
b

School of Electronics Engineering (SENSE), VIT University, Vellore 632 014, Tamil Nadu, India
Department of ETCE, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700 032, WB, India

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 26 October 2008
Received in revised form 20 October 2009
Accepted 22 January 2010
Available online 29 January 2010
Keywords:
Digital storage oscilloscope
Lead resistance compensation
Pulse width
Resistive sensor and timer astable mode

a b s t r a c t
A simple and low cost lead resistance compensation technique for resistive sensors is
presented in this paper. A timer IC555 in astable mode is utilized to develop this technique. In the timer output waveform, the time difference between positive pulse width
and negative pulse width that are measured sequentially from a single window of digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) is linear with sensor resistance and is completely independent of lead resistance. Theoretical predictions are supported by the experimental
data.
2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
In process industries, two-wire resistive sensors, e.g.
resistance temperature detectors (RTDs), strain gauges,
etc. are widely used for temperature, pressure, strain and
other process variables measurements from a remote location. But for remote measurements, the long connecting
lead wires between resistive sensor and control room
equipments arises electrical resistances. These lead resistances make a serious problem to the measuring circuit
and produce an error in measurements. This unwanted error increases with either due to increase in lead resistances
or due to ambient temperature variations in the connecting lead wires. For example in case of two-wire Pt-100
RTD based temperature measurement, an additional 1 X
resistance of each lead resistance produces about 5 C error
[1,3] and in two-wire 120 X strain gage based strain measurement, an additional 5.5 C [2] ambient temperature
variation in the connecting lead wire having 1.7 X resistance provides an error approximately 156 micro strains.

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: tk_maiti@rediffmail.com (T.Kr. Maiti).
0263-2241/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.measurement.2010.01.013

Therefore, for accurate measurements, the effect of lead

resistances must be either minimized or to be completely
eliminated.
The above lead resistance problem in the industrial
measurements is presently being reduced with a threewire technique [3], and is being completely eliminated
using a four-wire technique [1,3]. The disadvantage of
these techniques is that they need three wires or four wires
for the remote measurements, i.e. on counts of cost consideration, these techniques would not be cost effective. Also
for a remotely located large numbers of measuring points,
a huge amount of connecting wires are needed and hence
these techniques increase the complexity in the measuring
systems. Recently the rst author has published a twowire lead resistance compensation technique [4]. The only
drawback of this two-wire technique is that it is complicated compared to three- and four-wire technique.
In this paper, a new and very low cost lead resistance
compensation technique for resistive sensors is described.
In this technique, no additional clock generator, constant
current source, switching circuit, sample and hold circuits
and signal processing circuits are required so the cost of
the electronics reduces almost 80% compared to the recent
technique [4].

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T.Kr. Maiti, A. Kar / Measurement 43 (2010) 735738

Fig. 1. Proposed lead compensation system for resistive sensors.

s K C RS RA DRD  RONT C

2. Theory
Fig. 1 represents the proposed lead compensation technique for resistive sensors. A conventional timer IC555 and
two excellent matching diodes (D1 and D2) that take a very
important role for this technique are used in astable mode
[5] here. Two additional diodes, taken from two identical
NPN transistors on LM389, along with resistive sensor are
connected in this circuit, presumably positioned at the same
ambient temperature so as not only to eliminate the effects
of lead resistance but also compensate the effects of ambient
temperature variation in the remote measurements. To
study the charging and discharging time of capacitor properly, we have modeled the diodes here as temperature
dependent voltage sources in series with forward resistances. Due to these considerations, the capacitor (C) is
now not charged towards VCC but towards (VCC VD1) and
the positive pulse width/charging time (TC) of the output
waveform can be written as

T C K C RA RW1 RD1 RS RW2 C

where K C ln2V CC  3V D1 =V CC  3V D1 .
RS is the sensor resistance, RD1 is the forward resistance
of diode D1, VD1 is the diode voltage of diode D1 and RW1,
RW2 are the lead resistances.
Similarly, the capacitor (C) is now not discharged towards ground but towards VD2 and the negative pulse
width/discharging time (TD) can be represented as

T D K D RW2 RD2 RW1 RONT C

where K D ln2V CC  3V D2 =V CC  3V D2   K C .
RD2 is the forward resistance of diode D2 and RONT is the
ON resistance of discharging transistor of timer.
Therefore, using the Eqs. (1) and (2), the time difference
(s) between the charging and discharging time can be
expressed as

or,

s aRS D

where
a K C C; D RA DRD  RONT  and DRD RD1  RD2 .
The Eqs. (1)(3) demonstrate that TC and TD and s are depends on both temperature dependent diode voltages and
forward resistances. Since the diodes are taken from identical transistor pair on LM389, the value of the differential
resistance (DRD) is tends to zero. Also we have chosen the
resistance RA in the timer circuit so that the impact of inbuilt transistor ON resistance (RONT) can be minimized to
the measurements. Here, digital storage oscilloscope (DSO)
is used not only to display the output waveform but also to
measure the pulse widths.
It is also clear from Eq. (3) that time difference (s) obtained from two measured pulse widths is linear with sensor resistance (RS) and is free from both lead resistances
(RW1, RW2).
3. Results and discussions
Fig. 1 is used to obtain the experimental data for the
charging and discharging time of the output waveform
for different values of the sensor resistance at different sets
of lead resistances. Instead of a particular type and certain
length of the connecting lead wire, here we have studied a
remote connection between the sensing resistance (RS) and
timer with different sets of lead resistances as well as the
sensing resistance (RS) itself from a precision resistance
decimal box to fulll the above purposes.
All the resistances are measured with a 4 digital multimeter (Model VC980). Before the starting of the experiment, as a rst step we have warm up the experimental

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T.Kr. Maiti, A. Kar / Measurement 43 (2010) 735738

Table 1
Experimental Results. Ambient temperature, Tamb = 28 C, VCC = 5.01 V,
RA = 708.2 X, C = 0.1 lF, and VD1 = 0.673 V.
RS (X)

148.1
223.8
325.6
480.0
566.5
620.0
740.0
826.0

Time difference, s = TCTD (lS) at lead resistance

Set 1

Set 2

Set 3

Set 4

17.3
23.4
32.2
44.5
52.3
57.3
66.7
73.6

17.3
23.3
32.3
44.6
52.3
57.2
66.8
73.5

17.4
23.3
32.3
44.5
52.4
57.4
66.8
73.5

17.3
23.4
32.2
44.7
52.5
57.3
66.7
73.5

Set 1: RW1 = 10.38 X, RW2 = 10.35 X; Set 2: RW1 = 18.25 X, RW2 = 22.13 X;
Set 3: RW1 = 32.96 X, RW2 = 32.81 X; Set 4: RW1 = 12.52 X, RW2 = 47.77 X.

set up for 30 min and then started the experiment. In the

second step, we have xed the lead resistance

RW1 = 10.38 X, RW2 = 10.35 X (i.e. lead resistance set 1),

the sensing resistance RS = 148.1 X and observe the output
waveform in an Agilent digital storage oscilloscope (Model
54622A). When the output becomes stable, the charging
(TC) and discharging time (TD) of the output waveform
are measured sequentially from a single window of digital
storage oscilloscope. In this way for the same lead resistance set 1, we have varied the sensing resistance from
RS = 148.1 X to other values of resistances (e.g. 223.8 X,
325.6 X, etc.) and measured the charging and discharging
times for each sensing resistance from the DSO. Similarly,
we have followed the second step for the other sets of lead
resistances and completed the experiment after around 1 h
of the starting time. Based on the collected data, the time
differences (s) between charging (TC) and discharging time
(TD) are calculated and results are presented in Table 1.
This table shows that for a particular sensor resistance,

80

Tau in microsec

70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0

200

400

600

800

Sensor Resistance (Rs) in Ohm

Fig. 2. RS vs. s graph for the lead resistance set 2.

Fig. 3. Output waveform in DSO for the lead resistance set 4 and RS = 566.5 X.

1000

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T.Kr. Maiti, A. Kar / Measurement 43 (2010) 735738

time difference (s) is almost constant whether the connecting lead resistances are identical or non-identical.
We have obtained some error in the measurements. These
errors are in respect of accuracy (%) and linearity (%) point
of view and these are given by 2.15% and 0.24%, respectively, for the sensing resistance, RS = 325.6 X. The possible
sources of error are calibration drift, thermoelectric potentials, thermal noise, and ideally not matched diode pairs,
etc. The further studies of the circuit stability and the impact of the noise phenomena in the circuit are used to enrich the experimental study but due to lack of such
facilities in the laboratory we have not studied here. Here
we have assumed that the parameter a (=KCC) is constant
but in practice this parameter is ambient temperature
dependent because KC depends on diode voltage which is
again dependent on ambient temperature. Therefore some
errors are also being incorporated in the measurement due
to ambient temperature variation. It is also observed that
due to the variation of ambient temperature from 30 C
to 50 C, temperature dependent diode voltages provide almost 1.38% error in the measurement. Fig. 2 shows the
linear variation of time difference (s) with sensor resistance (RS) for lead resistance set 2 and it proofs the theoretical relationship as shown in Eq. (3). Fig. 3 shows the
experimental output waveform in the digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) for RS = 566.5 X and lead resistance set = set
4 (i.e. RW1 = 12.52 X, RW2 = 47.77 X).
Here although we are not giving more emphasis on
temperature measurement still we can declare that this

technique can easily be exploited for temperature measurement using a resistance temperature detector (RTD)
as a remotely connected resistive sensor whose resistance
varies almost linearly with temperature up to about
650 C.
4. Conclusion
Therefore, this proposed technique is very simple and
suitable for resistive sensors like resistance temperature
detectors (RTDs), strain gauges, etc. based remote measurements. This compensation technique is linear, i.e. the
variation of time difference (s) between the charging and
the discharging time of the output waveform with sensor
resistance (RS) for a particular set of lead resistance is linear. This straightforward technique may be acceptable in
process industries.
References
[1] E.O. Doebelin, Measurements Systems: Applications and Design, forth
ed., McGraw-Hill, 1990.
[2] <http://www.vishay.com>
[3] R. Pallas-Areny, J.G. Webster, Sensors and Signal Conditioning, second
ed., Wiley, New York, 2000.
[4] T K Maiti, A novel lead-wire resistance compensation technique using
two-wire resistance temperature detector, IEEE Sensors Journal 6 (6)
(2006) 14541458 (December).
[5] S. Franco, Design with Operational Ampliers and Analog Integrated
Circuits, second ed., McGraw-Hill, New York, 1998.