Ice accretion thickness prediction using flash infrared thermal imaging and BP neural networks

Abstract

The present study investigated ice accretion thickness under non-incoming flow icing conditions on the ground using an infrared thermography system that converts infrared radiation temperature. Two back propagation (BP) neural network models were developed to measure ice thickness. Both theoretical model and polynomials were employed to fit the icing surface temperature elevation sequence to extract the pixel-level temperature attenuation characteristics, which were served as the input to the BP neural networks. The prediction method of ice thickness by the BP neural network was analysed from three perspectives of sensitivity, dimension, and precision. In addition, K-nearest neighbour (KNN) and support vector regression (SVR) algorithms were compared with BP neural network. In terms of prediction effect, the BP neural network performed the best. The verification of the BP neural network based on the characteristics of the theoretical model proved that the method can effectively predict the thickness of ice accretion, and its prediction error does not exceed 10%.