A thermal sensor plays an important role in many applications. For example, maintaining a specific temperature is essential for equipment used to fabricate medical drugs, heat liquids, or clean other equipment. For applications like these, the responsiveness and accuracy of the detection circuit can be critical for quality control.

1. Physics SSA: Thermal
Sensors
Dennis Paulraj, Bharath M.V.K., Mohammad Zeeshan Ali,
Tarun Sai Reddy, Sai Prashanth, Ashish Kumar

2. INTRODUCTION
Thermal sensors are found in many
items, from commonplace items inside
any home to more sophisticated
applications. You can find sensors in
household electronics like thermostats or
thermometers. You will also find sensors
in things as sophisticated as your
personal computer or in a
microprocessor. It is vital for processors
to stay within the temperature range
specification to perform reliably and for
the processor to run at its expected
speed performance.

3. What is thermal
sensor?
Sensors are devices that measure a
physical or chemical reaction, such as
volume flow or heat flux, through changes
in electric resistance or signal

4. Types of thermal sensors
● One well-known thermal sensor is a mercury or alcohol thermometer. It uses
the volume of mercury or dyed ethanol, which expands when temperature
increases, to measure temperature in a tube with a temperature scale.
● Though very well known, mercury and alcohol thermometers are not well
suited to measure temperature in a personal computing device or
microprocessor because they tend to be too large for those applications.
● Other kinds of thermal sensors that can be suited for personal electronics
and microprocessors include thermocouples, resistance thermometers,
silicon sensors and radiation thermometers.

5. 1. Wiring the LCD
The pins 7 to 10 are not used in this case. Pins 11 to 14 are used to sent the characters to the display. Pin 14 is the
power for the LED backlight and needs to be connected to +5V with a 220 Ohm resistor in series. Pin 16 is the ground for
the LED backlight and needs to be connected to the ground of the Arduino. Pin 1 (Vss) needs to be connected to the
ground. Pin 2 needs to be connected to +5V. Both pin 1 and 2 power the LCD display. Pin 3 needs to be connected to the
middle connector of the potentiometer and is used to control the contrast of the display. Pin 4 is the register select
connector and controls where the characters will appear on the display. This pin is connected to pin 12 of the Arduino
Uno. Pin 5 is the read/write pin and because we will use the display to show things, we'll write to the display. To use the
write mode, we need to connect pin 5 to the ground. Pin 6 is the enabler pin and tells the display it will be receiving a
command. This one is connected to pin 11 of the Arduino Nano.

6. PROCEDURE

7. 2. Wiring the TMP36 temperature
sensor
The sensor has 3 pins. When facing the flat side of the sensor, this is the pin layout:
● Left pin: +5V
● Middle pin: analog output (0-5V)
● Right pin: GND

8. 3. Writing the Code
The key of the code is this: when you read the sensor value in a loop and write it every time to the display, the value
changes constantly. To avoid this, the sensor value is read every second and stored in an array. After 30 seconds, the
mean of the values is calculated and this value is written to the display. The value still varies but it's much more stable.

9. Result
It records the instantaneous
temperature values for a certain
period of time and displays the
average temperature recorded
during the given period of time

10. Conclusion
Therefore, we can see the working of a thermal sensor
in the form of a temperature sensor (TMP36) with the aid
of the above mentioned materials and the programming
code, how it senses the fluctuations in the surround
environment and measures those fluctuations.