Thermocouple signal

[lp19]

Hi,

I am just wanting an opinion on thermocouples,

I am trying to calibrate a thermocouple in the Lab using an Advantech PCI-1713 card with LabVIEW but its not working very well (too much noise)

The voltages we are getting from the thermocouples are between 0.4 mV to 3 mV but the noise is 8mV.

Is it a good idea to amplify the signal before it gets into the card so that the signal will be larger than the noise signal or is this a bad idea?

I know you can use filters and stuff but I am a begginer at LabVIEW and not very familiar with how filters work (wouldn't know where to start in other words)

Thankyou

Cheers
lp19

[mikeporter]

Well, given that temperature data dosn't tend to change very fast, you could just average the snot out of the data (acquire 200 readings and take the mean of the dataset as your value), but I would be more interested in finding out where the noise is coming from in the first place. What is your test system like physically (terminations, lead length, shielding, etc) Mike...