Electronic – Resistive sensor reading ADC

The first thing I'd look at is ripple in your voltage rail. Noisy voltages are killer with a voltage divider. A higher-quality measurement system might use a regulated constant current source to drive the RTD instead of a voltage divider. An LM317 can be used to do this - hook a resistor between the OUTPUT and ADJ terminal, and hook the RTD between ADJ and GND. The value of the resistor between output and adjust will set the current going through the RTD - use a precise resistor to be certain of the amount of current.

Otherwise, attempt to do the filtering in hardware if possible. You first have to figure out where the noise is coming from to make it effective. Determine what frequencies of noise you're seeing and then probe at the input to the gain stage, the output, and the input to the ADC. If there's noise everywhere, then it's in the source, otherwise it's being injected somewhere else. Make sure all of your IC's have bypass capacitors to start with. Then make sure that you don't have any long ground loops - make everything as direct (high current) of a connection to ground as possible. Don't daisy chain grounds - everything should get its own connection to ground that doesn't run through other chips.

If you're seeing noise at the source, chances are it's your voltage source for the divider. To combat this, you could put a capacitor in parallel with the RTD to make a simple filtering circuit. Just figure out what frequencies of noise you're seeing and match the capacitor to the resistance of the RTD and figure it out.

Amplifier U1 helps to make the circuit as close to "ideal" as possible. In the pH cell the impedances involved re very high and any variations from ideality are reflected in the results.

The "challenge" is given in the following section from the application note:

• The output of amplifier U1, which is set up in a unity-gain configuration, biases the reference electrode of the pH electrode with the same voltage, 512 mV, at low impedance.

  The pH-measuring electrode will produce a voltage which rides on top of this 512 mV bias voltage. In effect, the circuit shifts the bipolar pH-electrode signal to a unipolar signal for use in a single-supply system.

ie any error in this voltage is directly reflected in the output voltage as an error in pH reading.

The source impedance of the 2 x 10 k resistors in series is 5 K ( Reffective = R1 x R2 / (R1+ R2)). If the cell were to load this with a 1 megohm impedance the change in actual voltage would be 5k // 1 M = 0.005 = 0.5%. Loading with 10 Megohm would give 0.05% error etc. This does not sound much (& isn't much) but the sensitivity of the cell is 1 mV per pH. So 5/1000 x 512 mV ~= 2.5 mV or 2.5 pH error. And 10 megohm loading = 0.25 pH error. Even 100 megohm loading = 0.025 pH error.

If pH is read to even 0.1 pH units an error of 0.025 pH is 1/4 of a "bit". If pH was read to 0.01 units then 0.025 pH = 2.5 "bits " - and that's with 100 only megohm load!

Reducing R1 & R2 to 1 k or 100 ohms would help, at the expense of increased current drain U1 provides a better solution at acceptable cost.