Theory and performance of plated thermocouples.

A theory has been developed to describe the performance of thermocouples which have been formed by electroplating portions of one thermoelectric material with another. The electroplated leg of the thermocouple was modeled as a collection of infinitesimally small homogeneous thermocouples connected in series. Experiments were performed using several combinations of Constantan wire sizes and copper plating thicknesses. A transient method was used to develop the thermoelectric calibrations, and the theory was found to be in quite good agreement with the experiments. In addition, data gathered in a Soviet experiment were also found to be in close agreement with the theory.