Error compensation of the temperature influence on radar based displacement measurements

Highly precise sensor systems for contactless displacement measurements play an important role within the industrial application field. Various radar based measurement systems utilizing different techniques have been published for this purpose, but the influence of the ambient temperature on the measurement results has only rarely been investigated, yet. Whereas many publications deal with research on temperature compensation of single components, this paper examines the influence of the ambient temperature on the entire RF front end of the sensor system, a 61GHz Six-Port microwave interferometer. After presenting the measurement system, the temperature influences on the four output voltages and the consequences for the measurement results are analyzed. In the main part of this paper a compensation algorithm is proposed to significantly decrease the temperature induced impairments of the systematic measurement error.