Recent Advances in Thermal Tomography

Abstract

Recently, we have explored the use of thermal techniques to accurately measure material parameters (thermal conductivity, heat capacity) on a local basis using tomographic reconstruction. This requires the ability to accurately measure surface temperature evolution at any point on the surface of a body due to a localized thermal excitation such as a laser source. While there are many potential advantages to this approach, it’s uses have thus far been somewhat limited, principally due to the computationally intensive nature of the reconstruction process. Here we describe recent work to improve the efficiency of the reconstruction process using a) full field three dimensional imaging and b) converting the reconstruction algorithms from serial to parallel to speed up the calculation. Results from simulated data are presented to illustrate the utility of the new approaches.