  Data sets with high statistics taken at the cosmic ray facility, equipped
with 3 ATLAS BOS MDT chambers, in Garching (Munich) have been used to study
temperature and pressure effects on gas gain and drifttime. The deformation of
a thermally expanded chamber was reconstructed using the internal RasNik
alignment monitoring system and the tracks from cosmic data. For these studies
a heating system was designed to increase the temperature of the middle chamber
by up to 20 Kelvins over room temperature. For comparison the temperature
effects on gas properties have been simulated with Garfield. The maximum
drifttime decreased under temperature raise by -2.21 +- 0.08 ns/K, in agreement
with the results of pressure variations and the Garfield simulation. The
increased temperatures led to a linear increase of the gas gain of about 2.1%
1/K. The chamber deformation has been analyzed with the help of reconstructed
tracks. By the comparison of the tracks through the reference chambers with
these through the test chamber the thermal expansion has been reconstructed and
the result shows agreement with the theoretical expansion coefficient. As the
wires are fixed at the end of the chamber, the wire position calculation can
not provide a conclusion for the chamber middle. The complete deformation has
been identified with the analysis of the monitoring system RasNik, whose
measured values have shown a homogeneous expansion of the whole chamber,
overlayed by a shift and a rotation of the chamber middle with respect to the
outer part of the chamber. The established results of both methods are in
agreement. We present as well a model for the position-drifttime correction as
function of temperature.
