Reviewer: G. Raymond Peacock, Temperatures.com Inc.
This is a quite unique, practical book that has seemed to have languished unnoticed in the publishing archives of the ISA. It is compact, succinct and, in this reviewers opinion, one of the most practical and useful books on thermocouple thermometry available.
Tom Kerlin, for those who are not familiar with this author, is the retired Chairman of the Nuclear Engineering Department of the University of Tennessee. His earlier collaboration with the late Robert L. Shepard of Oak Ridge National Laboratories in 1982, produced the forerunner to this book, "Industrial Temperature Measurement," unfortunately out of print. This book was the text for many years for the complete three-day ISA course on Temperature Measurement. That course was taught alternately by the two gentlemen in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. The ISA had the course revised into a two-day course, limited to the key industrial sensors, in the mid-1990’s.
Dr. Kerlin’s book is obviously a labor of love and experience, condensing into seven well-organized chapters and three appendices, the essentials of thermocouples, their types, calibrations, configurations and more. It delves into three key topics not found in many other texts, the sources of thermocouple degradation, the trade-offs in selecting a thermocouple to perform a measurement under realistic conditions and the essential factors involved in achieving a temperature measurement. Even more useful are the comprehensive references at the end of each chapter and both the calibration tables and polynomial equations for generating voltages as a function of temperature and vice versa.
The organization is logical and clear. The text is accompanied by straightforward
illustrations. Equations are more than adequate and calculations are used with
examples in all the right places. The deeper theoretical details are left out,
but carefully referenced. This is a book designed for practical engineers, scientists
and technicians who need to understand how to choose and use thermocouples.
It meets those objectives very well and, as noted above, is a great bargain.
A highly recommended book for anyone who has occasion to specify thermocouples
for a temperature measurement.