Laboratories practices in engineering educational courses: the problem of thermocouple cold junction compensation with calibration error correction

In this paper the preliminary work of laboratory practices developed for didactic purposes for undergraduate courses at the Engineering Faculty of Polytechnic of Bari is presented. The educational purposes of these experiments can be summarized as follow: - to grant students the opportunity to verify theoretical arguments introduced in theoretical lessons; - to give technical skills; - to integrate research work and educational programs promoting the insertion of student in the scientific community. In this paper a technical solution useful to measure temperature by means of thermocouples is described; the main goal of the proposed technique is that it employs only one programmable multimeter and some devices commonly available in university laboratories.