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 i nverse heal conduction problems resolution. The approach described in the paper is based on a Boundary Element Method formulation of the tra nsient heat diffusion equation. The inverse problems under investigati on concern the time and space reconstruction of unknown boundary condi tions 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 condi tion or as a special boundary condition prescribing both temperature a nd heat flux density on the scanned boundary. We present some experime ntal results concerning line source strength identification and the re construction of unknown heat fluxes applied on an out of reach boundar y. All the examples presented in this paper are related to 2D transien t diffusion. As the inverse problem is ill-posed, time and space regul arization techniques are used to stabilize the solution and reduce the sensitivity of the latter to measurement errors. (C) Elsevier, Paris.