Infrared thermography applied to the resolution of inverse heat conduction problems: recovery of heat line sources and boundary conditions

In this paper we present an application of infrared thermography for inverse heat conduction problems resolution. The approach described in the paper is based on a Boundary Element Method formulation of the transient heat diffusion equation. The inverse problems under investigation concern the time and space reconstruction of unknown boundary conditions or heat line source strength. As there is a lack of information in the system, some additional measurements are necessary to solve the problem. In the examples proposed in this paper the extra information is provided by an infrared scanner. The measurements contained in the infrared pictures are used in the model as a Dirichlet boundary condition or as a special boundary condition prescribing both temperature and heat flux density on the scanned boundary. We present some experimental results concerning line source strength identification and the reconstruction of unknown heat fluxes applied on an out of reach boundary. All the examples presented in this paper are related to 2D transient diffusion. As the inverse problem is ill-posed, time and space regularization techniques are used to stabilize the solution and reduce the sensitivity of the latter to measurement errors.