THERMISTOR TEMPERATURE SENSING ALARM

This is a circuit which raises an alarm whenever the temperature crosses a certain level.
Temperature monitoring is a regularly used application in industries and in many other places
where the temperature should be kept below a maximum level. This circuit comes to our
rescue when a situation of that sort arises. This project is low cost and reliable. This circuit
has flexibility to adjust the temperature level to a set temperature. This circuit will activate
the alarm if the temperature increases above the set temperature

The figure shows the schematic diagram of the thermistor temperature sensing alarm

List of material
 thermistor (10 k)
 Variable resistor 100 (RV2)
 Resistor (120k, 4.7k, 1k, 470k, 56k, 100k, 4.7M, 1M)
 Transistor (BC 547)
 NAND (4011 chip)
 Capacitor (10000pF, 470F)
 Buzzer
 6V supply

Working principle
This circuit is very useful in-home security systems. This circuit works based on the principle
of switching property of the transistor. The thermistor and resistor R1 forms potential divider
n/w to drive the transistor. The semiconductor materials used for thermistors are sensitive to
temperature.The transistor is switched ON by the voltage drop through the resistor R1.Consider
the atmosphere’s temperature is around 25°C, and then the resistance of the thermistor
changes, then the voltage across the thermistor changes according to the principle of ohm’s law
V=IR. When the voltage across resistor R1 is low, then it is not sufficient to turn ON the
transistor. When the temperature increases, the resistance of thermistor decreases, so that the
drop across the resistor R1 increases which turns ON the transistor. When the transistor is
turned ON, the current starts to flow via 6V buzzer which generates a beep sound. The diode
is used for enabling unidirectional conduction and the capacitor removes sudden transients
from the thermistor. The element in the circuit that senses the temperature of the environment
is a thermistor. The name itself has its meaning. Thermistor means thermal+resistor. It means
that the resistance of the thermistor varies with change in temperature. The relationship
between the resistance of the thermistor and temperature is inversely related. This means that
if the temperature in the atmosphere increases, the resistance offered by the thermistor
decreases and if the temperature outside decreases, the resistance of the thermistor increases.
This property of the thermistor helps us to make use of it to sense the temperature of the
surroundings. The circuit makes use of two BC547 NPN transistors to switch the alarm when
the temperature above desired value is detected. The IC 4011 which is used in the circuit is a
quad NAND gate integrated circuit. It has four NAND gates assembled in the single IC itself.
This reduces the space and complexity of the circuit. The combinational circuit which is built
using the NAND gates is an oscillator circuit. As we know, any combinational circuit has an
inherent time delay between the input and the output. This time delay is usually considered as
undesirable but in this case we are making use of it to make it work like an oscillator. The
circuit turns on and off repeatedly with a time delay operating as a square wave oscillator. The
output of the oscillator is given to a buzzer which thereby operates at the audio frequency. The
capacitors used in the circuit acts as filters to remove unwanted components of the signals and
hence ensuring stability and proper operation.