Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to show how the fabrication parameters of screen-printed thick-film reference electrodes have been experimentally varied and their effect on device characteristics investigated. Design/methodology/approach -The tested devices were fabricated as screen-printed planar structures consisting of a silver back contact, a silver/ silver chloride interfacial layer and a final salt reservoir layer containing potassium chloride. The fabrication parameters varied included deposition method and thickness, salt concentration and binder type used for the final salt reservoir layer. Characterisation was achieved by monitoring the electrode potentials as a function of time following initial immersion in test fluids in order to ascertain initial hydration times, subsequent electrode drift rates and useful lifetime of the electrodes. Additionally, the effect of fabrication parameter variation on electrode stability and their response time in various test media was also investigated. Findings -Results indicate that, although a trade-off exists between hydration times and drift rate that is dependent on device thickness, the initial salt concentration levels and binder type also have a significant bearing on the practical useful lifetime. Generally speaking, thicker devices take longer to hydrate but have longer useful lifetimes in a given range of chloride environments. However, the electrode stability and response time is also influenced by the type of binder material employed for the final salt reservoir layer. Originality/value -The reported results help to explain better the behaviour of thick-film reference electrodes and contribute towards the optimisation of their design and fabrication for use in solid-state chemical sensors.

A correlation velocity log (CVL) is an acoustic navigation aid that estimates the velocity of a maritime vehicle using a transmitter and a receiving array. The CVL discussed here operates by calculating the correlation coefficient between the echoes from a pair of consecutive acoustic pulses transmitted towards the seafloor, across all combinations of receiver pairings in the array. A correlation surface is constructed by plotting the correlation coefficients versus the spatial separation vector of all the receiver pairings. The coordinates of the peak of this surface provide an estimate of the velocity vector of the vessel. However, the correlation coefficient surface exhibits high variance within a modest distance from the peak position, and individual datasets tend to be asymmetric about the peak position. Since each dataset consists of a sparsely sampled set of discrete measurements, the variance makes the task of peak estimation very challenging. This paper outlines the operating principles of CVLs and describes peak-finding techniques that are used to improve the accuracy and precision of the instrument. Three peak estimation techniques are considered, namely the highest point, and fitting of an axisymmetric quadratic model using either least squares or a nonlinear implementation of maximum likelihood estimation. It is shown that the maximum likelihood approach offers some advantages when the peak is controlled to lie near the centre of the receiver array, but the advantages are small compared to the additional computational load required.

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