Use of infrared thermography for the explicit heat flux estimation employing regularized measurements with truncated eigenfunction expansions

This work addresses the experimental validation of the explicit estimation of timewise varying boundary heat fluxes in thermally thin plates employing temperature measurements obtained by infrared thermography. The measurements were regularized with the controlled truncation of the eigenfunction expansions that are employed to overcome the ill-posed nature of the inverse problem. In order to allow for a critical analysis of the obtained estimates, reference results were obtained from Bayesian inference, implemented with the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method and the total variation prior. The good results achieved with the explicit technique, with very little computational effort, demonstrate the feasibility of the developed approach for practical applications.