A COLOR IMAGE-PROCESSING SYSTEM FOR TRANSIENT LIQUID-CRYSTAL HEAT-TRANSFER EXPERIMENTS

A color image processing system for liquid crystal heat transfer exper iment has been developed. The system is capable of digitizing and proc essing the complete liquid crystal surface color (hue) change history in a transient test and, together with a calibration can give the comp lete history of surface temperature over a full surface. Two methods f or automatically processing the hue history to give heal transfer coef ficient distributions are presented. Both methods raise the accuracy o f the transient technique above other approaches by using the redundan cy inherent in the multiple surface temperature measurements. The firs t regression approach applied to the determination of both h and T-gas is reported. The uncertainty in all measurements has been quantified and examples of applications of both techniques given.