Characterization of an uncooled infrared thermographic system suitable for the solution of the 2-D inverse heat conduction problem

An experimental analysis and a data processing procedure, aimed to the characterization of an uncooled microbolometric infrared camera, have been carried out. The instrument performance test is addressed to the application of infrared thermography to the parameter estimation problem based on the solution of the inverse heat conduction problem. With this regard, a new figure of merit, which enables to estimate the local noise level in the thermal image, has been suggested. This parameter may be used to characterize the performance of IR and also of other thermographic devices, for applications common to a wide category of heat transfer measurements in which the spatial first or second derivatives of a thermal two-dimensional signal are needed. The instrument has been compared, in terms of local noise level, to an IR camera based on the cooled photon detector array technology. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.