Temperature compensation of NTC thermistors based anemometer

Thermal anemometers based on self-heated thermistors with negative temperature coefficients are a robust, sensitive and low-cost alternative to standard hot-wire anemometers in wind turbine characterization and optimization. However, changes in ambient temperature greatly affect the accuracy in wind speed measurements of these devices. In this paper, a temperature compensation method incorporating two thermistors with negative temperature coefficients is experimentally investigated. A temperature compensated anemometer circuit is proposed. The effectiveness of the implemented temperature compensation method is verified over a span of 16 degrees for two different air velocities. To account for a possible thermistor mismatch, a correction procedure is proposed and verified. In the end, it is shown that the air temperature can be reconstructed from the uncompensated anemometer outputs as well. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.