Fundamentals

The aim of measurement technology is to measure physical or biological quantities. A measured quantity is normally shown on a display. If, for example, you take your temperature with a thermometer when you have a fever, your body temperature is shown on a small display of the clinical thermometer. For this, the quantity to be measured must be converted into a format that can be shown on a display. In this lecture, you will learn how this works.

Today, measurement technology has a lot to do with electrical engineering. The main reason is that we increasingly prepare measurement results not for people who read them off measuring instruments, but for machines. In the digital world, machines need digital measurement data. There is only one quantity that can be digitised directly: electrical voltage. Very rarely, times or electric currents are also digitised, but again only as electrical quantities.

For this reason, all physical quantities that are measured and digitised in the process are converted into an electrical voltage. This happens in several steps, which are discussed one after the other in this lecture. The components involved in the signal processing are also called the “measurement chain”. In the first part of the tutorial, we look at the function blocks of the measurement chain and their basic properties.