Infrared image processing devoted to thermal non-contact characterization-Applications to Non-Destructive Evaluation, Microfluidics and 2D source term distribution for multispectral tomography

Abstract

The cost of IR cameras is more and more decreasing. Beyond the preliminary calibration step and the global instrumentation, the infrared image processing is then one of the key step for achieving in very broad domains. Generally the IR images are coming from the transient temperature field related to the emission of a black surface in response to an external or internal heating (active IR thermography). The first applications were devoted to the so called thermal Non-Destructive Evaluation methods by considering a thin sample and 1D transient heat diffusion through the sample (transverse diffusion). With simplified assumptions related to the transverse diffusion, the in-plane diffusion and transport phenomena can be also considered. A general equation can be applied in order to balance the heat transfer at the pixel scale or between groups of pixels in order to estimate several fields of thermophysical properties (heterogeneous field of in-plane diffusivity, flow distributions, source terms). There is a lot of possible strategies to process the space and time distributed big amount of data (previous integral transformation of the images, compression, elimination of the non useful areas...), generally based on the necessity to analyse the derivative versus space and time of the temperature field. Several illustrative examples related to the Non-Destructive Evaluation of heterogeneous solids, the thermal characterization of chemical reactions in microfluidic channels and the design of systems for multispectral tomography, will be presented.