I am looking for a cheap oxygen sensor for application in a gas analysis system. The cheapest I can find is a Zirconium based car exhaust sensors, which require extremely high operating temperatures to produce significant output voltages, approximately 600 degrees centigrades. I am looking to enclose it in a plastic container, but the very large operating temperature is worrying me. Have any of you dealt with such a sensor? If so, do you think it's heat isolated enough for my application, to be enclosed within a plastic container? This is an example of a sensor I was thinking of.
Electronic – Zirconium oxygen sensors for car exhaust for use in low temperature environment
sensortemperature
Related Solutions
For such a sensor network I would absolutely consider using Dallas 1-wire components for great flexibility and reasonable price. It is well supported in Linux via owfs.
At www.hobby-boards.com there is a small T3-R1-A ready made board which you just connect with cat5/RJ45 priced at 18USD. According to the documentation it uses the DS18S20 sensor like already mentioned by BG100.
Temperature is a measure of the average thermal energy. A temp sensor will not tell you if we are talking a dry or wet bulb temp. The temperature is the same for both.
Wet or dry comes into play when you start thinking about how much thermal energy would be required to change the temperature of the air or how much condensation you will have if you lower the temperature of the air, etc.
To measure wet bulb, you need temperature and relative humidity. With those two sensors, you should have what you need.
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Best Answer
I have never tried using one in a plastic container, but the body is made of metal so heat transfers relatively well. After a flame test or testing plugged into an actual exhaust I made sure to not touch the sensor with my bare fingers.
A generic plastic container will almost certainly not be able to deal with the hot operating temperatures, especially if you have to rely at all on the exhaust to heat up the sensor.
Depending on the application, you could try getting exhaust tubing with an O2 sensor port and flow your gas through the tubing past your sensor. The tubing is relatively cheap to get, you may even be able to find something at a local junk yard.