Temperature error in radiation thermometry caused by emissivity and reflectance measurement error.

A general expression for the temperature error caused by emissivity uncertainty is developed, and it is concluded that lower-wavelength systems provide significantly less temperature error. A technique to measure the normal emissivity is proposed that uses a normally incident light beam and an aperture to collect a portion of the energy reflected from the surface and to measure essentially both the specular component and the biangular reflectance at the edge of the aperture. The theoretical results show that the aperture size need not be substantial to provide reasonably low temperature errors for a broad class of materials and surface reflectance conditions.