The Sensors & Metrology course provides a comprehensive introduction to the principles, technologies, and methods used for measuring physical quantities in industrial and scientific systems. It focuses on the structure and operation of a measurement chain, beginning with the physical phenomenon to be measured and ending with reliable, usable electrical data.
Throughout the course, students learn how sensors convert mechanical, thermal, optical, and other physical variables into electrical signals, and how these signals are conditioned, amplified, filtered, and digitized for further processing. The course emphasizes the importance of metrology, which ensures that measurements are accurate, precise, reproducible, and traceable to scientific standards.
Students explore the operating principles of various sensor families (temperature, photometric, position, force, pressure, flow, humidity, and speed sensors), along with their metrological characteristics, such as sensitivity, linearity, resolution, accuracy, drift, and hysteresis. The course also introduces fundamental concepts of signal conditioning (voltage dividers, bridges, operational amplifiers, instrumentation amplifiers) and provides an overview of data acquisition systems used in modern instrumentation.