Construction and Characterization of a Large Aperture Blackbody for Infrared Radiometer Calibration

A large aperture blackbody (LABB) with a diameter of 1 m has been successfully constructed for calibrating radiation thermometers and infrared radiometers with a wide field of view in the temperature range between 10 °C and 90 °C. The blackbody is a 1 m long cylindro-conical cavity with a diameter of 1.1 m. Its conical bottom has an apex angle of 120°. To achieve good temperature stability and uniformity, the cavity is integrated to a water-bath to which the pressurized water is supplied from a reservoir. To reduce the convection heat loss from the cavity to the ambient, the cavity is purged of the dried air that passes through a coiled tube immersed in the reservoir. For an uncertainty evaluation of the LABB, its temperature stability was measured by using a reference radiation thermometer (RRT) and a platinum resistance thermometer (PRT), and its radiance temperature distributions on the aperture plane were measured by using a thermal camera. Measuring the spectral emissivity of the coating material, the effective emissivity of the blackbody was calculated to be 0.9955 from 1 μm to 15 μm. The expanded uncertainty of the radiance temperature scale was evaluated based on the PRT readings, which vary from 0.3 °C to 0.5 °C ( k = 2) in the temperature range. The temperature scale is validated by comparing with the RRT of which the temperature scale is realized by a multiple fixed-point calibration.