Infrared technique for simultaneous determination of temperature and emissivity

This paper presents, in the context of materials dynamic behaviour study, a method for simultaneous measurement of the temperature and emissivity of a solid's surface, by the use of infrared radiation. in contrast to existing methods, this method has no need for a pre-measurement of the surface emissivity. The emissivity and the temperature are measured simultaneously, by detecting the variations of emitted radiation and infrared radiation reflecting on the surface, at two different spectral zones. In this way, the accuracy of the measured temperature is greatly improved in cases were the surface optical properties vary during the measurement. Several experiments were carried out in order to complete the theoretical foundation of the method and to outline its accuracy and some of its limitations. There are various industrial applications of this method, for example the control of the temperature of the mechanical parts during work machining. One of them may be the measurement of the temperature of a sample during mechanical testing. An application of the method is proposed, that is easy to employ with non-sophisticated infrared and optical components. The results confirm the accuracy of the proposed method with an order of 3% of precision for temperature determination. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.