Active thermo-reflectometry for absolute temperature measurement by infrared thermography on specular materials

Knowledge of material emissivity maps and their true temperatures is of great interest for contactless process monitoring and control with infrared cameras when strong heat transfer and temperature change are involved. This approach is always followed by emissivity or reflections issues. In this work, we describe the development of a contactless infrared imaging technique based on the pyro-reflectometry approach and a specular model of the material reflection in order to overcome emissivities and reflections problems. This approach enables in situ and real-time identification of emissivity fields and autocalibration of the radiative intensity leaving the sample by using a black body equivalent ratio. This is done to obtain the absolute temperature field of any specular material using the infrared wavelength. The presented set up works for both camera and pyrometer regardless of the spectral range. The proposed method is evaluated at room temperature with several heterogeneous samples covering a large range of emissivity values. From these emissivity fields, raw and heterogeneous measured radiative fluxes are transformed into complete absolute temperature fields.